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AI for Beyond 5G Networks: A Cyber-Security Defense or Offense Enabler? Artificial intelligence (AI) is envisioned to play a pivotal role in empowering intelligent, adaptive and autonomous security management in 5G and beyond networks, thanks to its potential to uncover hidden patterns from a large set of time-varying multi-dimensional data, and deliver faster and accurate decisions. Unfortunately, AI's capabilities and vulnerabilities make it a double-edged sword that may jeopardize the security of future networks. This article sheds light on how<;span class="upper-case"> Ai <;/span>may impact the security of 5G and its successor from its posture of defender, offender or victim, and recommends potential defenses to safeguard from malevolent AI while pointing out their limitations and adoption challenges.

Network anomaly detection using IP flows with Principal Component Analysis and Ant Colony Optimization. It is remarkable how proactive network management is in such demand nowadays, since networks are growing in size and complexity and Information Technology services cannot be stopped. In this manner, it is necessary to use an approach which proactively identifies traffic behavior patterns which may harm the network's normal operations. Aiming an automated management to detect and prevent potential problems, we present and compare two novel anomaly detection mechanisms based on statistical procedure Principal Component Analysis and the Ant Colony Optimization metaheuristic. These methods generate a traffic profile, called Digital Signature of Network Segment using Flow analysis (DSNSF), which is adopted as normal network behavior. Then, this signature is compared with the real network traffic by using a modification of the Dynamic Time Warping metric in order to recognize anomalous events. Thus, a seven-dimensional analysis of IP flows is performed, allowing the characterization of bits, packets and flows traffic transmitted per second, and the extraction of descriptive flow attributes, like source IP address, destination IP address, source TCP/UDP port and destination TCP/UDP port. The systems were evaluated using a real network environment and showed promising results. Moreover, the correspondence between true-positive and false-positive rates demonstrates that the systems are able to enhance the detection of anomalous behavior by maintaining a satisfactory false-alarm rate. Display Omitted Anomaly detection issue is addressed based on network traffic profiling.Proposal and comparison of detection methods belonging to distinct algorithm classes.Detection mechanism constructed over an adaptation of a pattern matching technique.Use of real and simulated traffic to evaluate the proposed methods.Traffic patterns that may harm the network operations are proactively identified.

A multi-step outlier-based anomaly detection approach to network-wide traffic. We propose a multi-step outlier-based anomaly detection approach to network-wide traffic.We propose a feature selection algorithm to select relevant non-redundant subset of features.We propose a tree-based clustering algorithm to generate non-redundant overlapped clusters.We introduce an efficient score-based outlier estimation technique to detect anomalies in network-wide traffic.We establish a fast distributed feature extraction framework to extract significant features from raw network-wide traffic.We conduct extensive experiments using the proposed algorithms with synthetic and real-life network-wide traffic datasets. Outlier detection is of considerable interest in fields such as physical sciences, medical diagnosis, surveillance detection, fraud detection and network anomaly detection. The data mining and network management research communities are interested in improving existing score-based network traffic anomaly detection techniques because of ample scopes to increase performance. In this paper, we present a multi-step outlier-based approach for detection of anomalies in network-wide traffic. We identify a subset of relevant traffic features and use it during clustering and anomaly detection. To support outlier-based network anomaly identification, we use the following modules: a mutual information and generalized entropy based feature selection technique to select a relevant non-redundant subset of features, a tree-based clustering technique to generate a set of reference points and an outlier score function to rank incoming network traffic to identify anomalies. We also design a fast distributed feature extraction and data preparation framework to extract features from raw network-wide traffic. We evaluate our approach in terms of detection rate, false positive rate, precision, recall and F-measure using several high dimensional synthetic and real-world datasets and find the performance superior in comparison to competing algorithms.

FLaaS: Federated Learning as a Service ABSTRACTFederated Learning (FL) is emerging as a promising technology to build machine learning models in a decentralized, privacy-preserving fashion. Indeed, FL enables local training on user devices, avoiding user data to be transferred to centralized servers, and can be enhanced with differential privacy mechanisms. Although FL has been recently deployed in real systems, the possibility of collaborative modeling across different 3rd-party applications has not yet been explored. In this paper, we tackle this problem and present Federated Learning as a Service (FLaaS), a system enabling different scenarios of 3rd-party application collaborative model building and addressing the consequent challenges of permission and privacy management, usability, and hierarchical model training. FLaaS can be deployed in different operational environments. As a proof of concept, we implement it on a mobile phone setting and discuss practical implications of results on simulated and real devices with respect to on-device training CPU cost, memory footprint and power consumed per FL model round. Therefore, we demonstrate FLaaS's feasibility in building unique or joint FL models across applications for image object detection in a few hours, across 100 devices.

A Distributed NWDAF Architecture for Federated Learning in 5G For network automation and intelligence in 5G, the network data analytics function (NWDAF) has been introduced as a new network function. However, the existing centralized NWDAF structure can be overloaded if an amount of analytic data are concentrated. In this paper, we introduce a distributed NWDAF structure tailored for federated learning (FL) in 5G. Leaf NWDAFs create local models and root NWD...

Footprints: history-rich tools for information foraging Inspired by Hill and Hollans original work [7], we have beendeveloping a theory of interaction history and building tools toapply this theory to navigation in a complex information space. Wehave built a series of tools - map, paths, annota- tions andsignposts - based on a physical-world navigation metaphor. Thesetools have been in use for over a year. Our user study involved acontrolled browse task and showed that users were able to get thesame amount of work done with significantly less effort.

A Low-Complexity Analytical Modeling for Cross-Layer Adaptive Error Protection in Video Over WLAN We find a low-complicity and accurate model to solve the problem of optimizing MAC-layer transmission of real-time video over wireless local area networks (WLANs) using cross-layer techniques. The objective in this problem is to obtain the optimal MAC retry limit in order to minimize the total packet loss rate. First, the accuracy of Fluid and M/M/1/K analytical models is examined. Then we derive a closed-form expression for service time in WLAN MAC transmission, and will use this in mathematical formulation of our optimization problem based on M/G/1 model. Subsequently we introduce an approximate and simple formula for MAC-layer service time, which leads to the M/M/1 model. Compared with M/G/1, we particularly show that our M/M/1-based model provides a low-complexity and yet quite accurate means for analyzing MAC transmission process in WLAN. Using our M/M/1 model-based analysis, we derive closed-form formulas for the packet overflow drop rate and optimum retry-limit. These closed-form expressions can be effectively invoked for analyzing adaptive retry-limit algorithms. Simulation results (network simulator-2) will verify the accuracy of our analytical models.

Semantic Image Synthesis With Spatially-Adaptive Normalization We propose spatially-adaptive normalization, a simple but effective layer for synthesizing photorealistic images given an input semantic layout. Previous methods directly feed the semantic layout as input to the deep network, which is then processed through stacks of convolution, normalization, and nonlinearity layers. We show that this is suboptimal as the normalization layers tend to "wash away" semantic information. To address the issue, we propose using the input layout. for modulating the activations in normalization layers through a spatially-adaptive,learned transformation. Experiments on several challenging datasets demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method over existing approaches, regarding both visual fidelity and align-ment with input layouts. Finally, our model allows user control over both semantic and style as synthesizing images.

Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults The problem addressed here concerns a set of isolated processors, some unknown subset of which may be faulty, that communicate only by means of two-party messages. Each nonfaulty processor has a private value of information that must be communicated to each other nonfaulty processor. Nonfaulty processors always communicate honestly, whereas faulty processors may lie. The problem is to devise an algorithm in which processors communicate their own values and relay values received from others that allows each nonfaulty processor to infer a value for each other processor. The value inferred for a nonfaulty processor must be that processor's private value, and the value inferred for a faulty one must be consistent with the corresponding value inferred by each other nonfaulty processor.It is shown that the problem is solvable for, and only for, n ≥ 3m + 1, where m is the number of faulty processors and n is the total number. It is also shown that if faulty processors can refuse to pass on information but cannot falsely relay information, the problem is solvable for arbitrary n ≥ m ≥ 0. This weaker assumption can be approximated in practice using cryptographic methods.

Reservoir computing approaches to recurrent neural network training Echo State Networks and Liquid State Machines introduced a new paradigm in artificial recurrent neural network (RNN) training, where an RNN (the reservoir) is generated randomly and only a readout is trained. The paradigm, becoming known as reservoir computing, greatly facilitated the practical application of RNNs and outperformed classical fully trained RNNs in many tasks. It has lately become a vivid research field with numerous extensions of the basic idea, including reservoir adaptation, thus broadening the initial paradigm to using different methods for training the reservoir and the readout. This review systematically surveys both current ways of generating/adapting the reservoirs and training different types of readouts. It offers a natural conceptual classification of the techniques, which transcends boundaries of the current “brand-names” of reservoir methods, and thus aims to help in unifying the field and providing the reader with a detailed “map” of it.

Implementing Vehicle Routing Algorithms

Finite-approximation-error-based discrete-time iterative adaptive dynamic programming. In this paper, a new iterative adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm is developed to solve optimal control problems for infinite horizon discrete-time nonlinear systems with finite approximation errors. First, a new generalized value iteration algorithm of ADP is developed to make the iterative performance index function converge to the solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. The ...

An evolutionary programming approach for securing medical images using watermarking scheme in invariant discrete wavelet transformation. •The proposed watermarking scheme utilized improved discrete wavelet transformation (IDWT) to retrieve the invariant wavelet domain.•The entropy mechanism is used to identify the suitable region for insertion of watermark. This will improve the imperceptibility and robustness of the watermarking procedure.•The scaling factors such as PSNR and NC are considered for evaluation of the proposed method and the Particle Swarm Optimization is employed to optimize the scaling factors.

A Hierarchical Architecture Using Biased Min-Consensus for USV Path Planning This paper proposes a hierarchical architecture using the biased min-consensus (BMC) method, to solve the path planning problem of unmanned surface vessel (USV). We take the fixed-point monitoring mission as an example, where a series of intermediate monitoring points should be visited once by USV. The whole framework incorporates the low-level layer planning the standard path between any two intermediate points, and the high-level fashion determining their visiting sequence. First, the optimal standard path in terms of voyage time and risk measure is planned by the BMC protocol, given that the corresponding graph is constructed with node state and edge weight. The USV will avoid obstacles or keep a certain distance safely, and arrive at the target point quickly. It is proven theoretically that the state of the graph will converge to be stable after finite iterations, i.e., the optimal solution can be found by BMC with low calculation complexity. Second, by incorporating the constraint of intermediate points, their visiting sequence is optimized by BMC again with the reconstruction of a new virtual graph based on the former planned results. The extensive simulation results in various scenarios also validate the feasibility and effectiveness of our method for autonomous navigation.

Spherical search optimizer: a simple yet efficient meta-heuristic approach In these years, more meta-heuristic approaches have been proposed inspired by nature. However, the search mode has not been researched deeply. In this paper, we find that search style and individual selection mechanism for interaction are the core problems for a meta-heuristic algorithm. In particular, we focus on search style and have studied the principle of basic hypercube search style and basic reduced hypercube search style. Inspired by them, we propose a spherical search style. Furthermore, we design a spherical search optimizer by the spherical search style and tournament selection method. And then, theoretical analysis of it is provided. To validate the performance of the proposed method, we compare our approach against nine state-of-the-art algorithms. The CEC2013, CEC2014, CEC2015 and CEC2017 suites and the data clustering optimization problem in the real world are used. Experimental results and analysis verify that it is a simple yet efficient method to solve continuous optimization problems.

Tabu search based multi-watermarks embedding algorithm with multiple description coding Digital watermarking is a useful solution for digital rights management systems, and it has been a popular research topic in the last decade. Most watermarking related literature focuses on how to resist deliberate attacks by applying benchmarks to watermarked media that assess the effectiveness of the watermarking algorithm. Only a few papers have concentrated on the error-resilient transmission of watermarked media. In this paper, we propose an innovative algorithm for vector quantization (VQ) based image watermarking, which is suitable for error-resilient transmission over noisy channels. By incorporating watermarking with multiple description coding (MDC), the scheme we propose to embed multiple watermarks can effectively overcome channel impairments while retaining the capability for copyright and ownership protection. In addition, we employ an optimization technique, called tabu search, to optimize both the watermarked image quality and the robustness of the extracted watermarks. We have obtained promising simulation results that demonstrate the utility and practicality of our algorithm. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

On Deployment of Wireless Sensors on 3-D Terrains to Maximize Sensing Coverage by Utilizing Cat Swarm Optimization With Wavelet Transform. In this paper, a deterministic sensor deployment method based on wavelet transform (WT) is proposed. It aims to maximize the quality of coverage of a wireless sensor network while deploying a minimum number of sensors on a 3-D surface. For this purpose, a probabilistic sensing model and Bresenham's line of sight algorithm are utilized. The WT is realized by an adaptive thresholding approach for the generation of the initial population. Another novel aspect of the paper is that the method followed utilizes a Cat Swarm Optimization (CSO) algorithm, which mimics the behavior of cats. We have modified the CSO algorithm so that it can be used for sensor deployment problems on 3-D terrains. The performance of the proposed algorithm is compared with the Delaunay Triangulation and Genetic Algorithm based methods. The results reveal that CSO based sensor deployment which utilizes the wavelet transform method is a powerful and successful method for sensor deployment on 3-D terrains.

FPGA-Based Parallel Metaheuristic PSO Algorithm and Its Application to Global Path Planning for Autonomous Robot Navigation This paper presents a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based parallel metaheuristic particle swarm optimization algorithm (PPSO) and its application to global path planning for autonomous robot navigating in structured environments with obstacles. This PPSO consists of three parallel PSOs along with a communication operator in one FPGA chip. The parallel computing architecture takes advantages of maintaining better population diversity and inhibiting premature convergence in comparison with conventional PSOs. The collision-free discontinuous path generated from the PPSO planner is then smoothed using the cubic B-spline and system-on-a-programmable-chip (SoPC) technology. Experimental results are conducted to show the merit of the proposed FPGA-based PPSO path planner and smoother for global path planning of autonomous mobile robot navigation.

QUasi-Affine TRansformation Evolution with External ARchive (QUATRE-EAR): An enhanced structure for Differential Evolution Optimization demands are ubiquitous in science and engineering. The key point is that the approach to tackle a complex optimization problem should not itself be difficult. Differential Evolution (DE) is such a simple method, and it is arguably a very powerful stochastic real-parameter algorithm for single-objective optimization. However, the performance of DE is highly dependent on control parameters and mutation strategies. Both tuning the control parameters and selecting the proper mutation strategy are still tedious but important tasks for users. In this paper, we proposed an enhanced structure for DE algorithm with less control parameters to be tuned. The crossover rate control parameter Cr is replaced by an automatically generated evolution matrix and the control parameter F can be renewed in an adaptive manner during the whole evolution. Moreover, an enhanced mutation strategy with time stamp mechanism is advanced as well in this paper. CEC2013 test suite for real-parameter single objective optimization is employed in the verification of the proposed algorithm. Experiment results show that our proposed algorithm is competitive with several well-known DE variants.

A Parallel Multi-Verse Optimizer for Application in Multilevel Image Segmentation Multi-version optimizer (MVO) inspired by the multi-verse theory is a new optimization algorithm for challenging multiple parameter optimization problems in the real world. In this paper, a novel parallel multi-verse optimizer (PMVO) with the communication strategy is proposed. The parallel mechanism is implemented to randomly divide the initial solutions into several groups, and share the information of different groups after each fixed iteration. This can significantly promote the cooperation individual of MVO algorithm, and reduce the deficiencies that the original MVO is premature convergence, search stagnation and easily trap into local optimal search space. To confirm the performance of the proposed scheme, the PMVO algorithm was compared with the other well-known optimization algorithms, such as gray wolf optimizer (GWO), particle swarm optimization (PSO), multi-version optimizer (MVO), and parallel particle swarm optimization (PPSO) under CEC2013 test suite. The experimental results prove that the PMVO is superior to the other compared algorithms. In addition, PMVO is also applied to solve complex multilevel image segmentation problems based on minimum cross entropy thresholding. The application results appear that the proposed PMVO algorithm can achieve higher quality image segmentation compared to other similar algorithms.

Computational thinking Summary form only given. My vision for the 21st century, Computational Thinking, will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization. We introduce Adam, an algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions, based on adaptive estimates of lower-order moments. The method is straightforward to implement, is computationally efficient, has little memory requirements, is invariant to diagonal rescaling of the gradients, and is well suited for problems that are large in terms of data and/or parameters. The method is also appropriate for non-stationary objectives and problems with very noisy and/or sparse gradients. The hyper-parameters have intuitive interpretations and typically require little tuning. Some connections to related algorithms, on which Adam was inspired, are discussed. We also analyze the theoretical convergence properties of the algorithm and provide a regret bound on the convergence rate that is comparable to the best known results under the online convex optimization framework. Empirical results demonstrate that Adam works well in practice and compares favorably to other stochastic optimization methods. Finally, we discuss AdaMax, a variant of Adam based on the infinity norm.

Untangling Blockchain: A Data Processing View of Blockchain Systems. Blockchain technologies are gaining massive momentum in the last few years. Blockchains are distributed ledgers that enable parties who do not fully trust each other to maintain a set of global states. The parties agree on the existence, values, and histories of the states. As the technology landscape is expanding rapidly, it is both important and challenging to have a firm grasp of what the core ...

Multivariate Short-Term Traffic Flow Forecasting Using Time-Series Analysis Existing time-series models that are used for short-term traffic condition forecasting are mostly univariate in nature. Generally, the extension of existing univariate time-series models to a multivariate regime involves huge computational complexities. A different class of time-series models called structural time-series model (STM) (in its multivariate form) has been introduced in this paper to develop a parsimonious and computationally simple multivariate short-term traffic condition forecasting algorithm. The different components of a time-series data set such as trend, seasonal, cyclical, and calendar variations can separately be modeled in STM methodology. A case study at the Dublin, Ireland, city center with serious traffic congestion is performed to illustrate the forecasting strategy. The results indicate that the proposed forecasting algorithm is an effective approach in predicting real-time traffic flow at multiple junctions within an urban transport network.

A novel full structure optimization algorithm for radial basis probabilistic neural networks. In this paper, a novel full structure optimization algorithm for radial basis probabilistic neural networks (RBPNN) is proposed. Firstly, a minimum volume covering hyperspheres (MVCH) algorithm is proposed to heuristically select the initial hidden layer centers of the RBPNN, and then the recursive orthogonal least square (ROLS) algorithm combined with the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is adopted to further optimize the initial structure of the RBPNN. Finally, the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm are evaluated through a plant species identification task involving 50 plant species.

G2-type SRMPC scheme for synchronous manipulation of two redundant robot arms. In this paper, to remedy the joint-angle drift phenomenon for manipulation of two redundant robot arms, a novel scheme for simultaneous repetitive motion planning and control (SRMPC) at the joint-acceleration level is proposed, which consists of two subschemes. To do so, the performance index of each SRMPC subscheme is derived and designed by employing the gradient dynamics twice, of which a convergence theorem and its proof are presented. In addition, for improving the accuracy of the motion planning and control, position error, and velocity, error feedbacks are incorporated into the forward kinematics equation and analyzed via Zhang neural-dynamics method. Then the two subschemes are simultaneously reformulated as two quadratic programs (QPs), which are finally unified into one QP problem. Furthermore, a piecewise-linear projection equation-based neural network (PLPENN) is used to solve the unified QP problem, which can handle the strictly convex QP problem in an inverse-free manner. More importantly, via such a unified QP formulation and the corresponding PLPENN solver, the synchronism of two redundant robot arms is guaranteed. Finally, two given tasks are fulfilled by 2 three-link and 2 five-link planar robot arms, respectively. Computer-simulation results validate the efficacy and accuracy of the SRMPC scheme and the corresponding PLPENN solver for synchronous manipulation of two redundant robot arms.

Adaptive Fuzzy Control With Prescribed Performance for Block-Triangular-Structured Nonlinear Systems. In this paper, an adaptive fuzzy control method with prescribed performance is proposed for multi-input and multioutput block-triangular-structured nonlinear systems with immeasurable states. Fuzzy logic systems are adopted to identify the unknown nonlinear system functions. Adaptive fuzzy state observers are designed to solve the problem of unmeasured states, and a new observer-based output-feedb...

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Classification of resource management approaches in fog/edge paradigm and future research prospects: a systematic review The fog paradigm extends the cloud capabilities at the edge of the network. Fog computing-based real-time applications (Online gaming, 5G, Healthcare 4.0, Industrial IoT, autonomous vehicles, virtual reality, augmented reality, and many more) are growing at a very fast pace. There are limited resources at the fog layer compared to the cloud, which leads to resource constraint problems. Edge resources need to be utilized efficiently to fulfill the growing demand for a large number of IoT devices. Lots of work has been done for the efficient utilization of edge resources. This paper provided a systematic review of fog resource management literature from the year 2016–2021. In this review paper, the fog resource management approaches are divided into 9 categories which include resource scheduling, application placement, load balancing, resource allocation, resource estimation, task offloading, resource provisioning, resource discovery, and resource orchestration. These resource management approaches are further subclassified based on the technology used, QoS factors, and data-driven strategies. Comparative analysis of existing articles is provided based on technology, tools, application area, and QoS factors. Further, future research prospects are discussed in the context of QoS factors, technique/algorithm, tools, applications, mobility support, heterogeneity, AI-based, distributed network, hierarchical network, and security. A systematic literature review of existing survey papers is also included. At the end of this work, key findings are highlighted in the conclusion section.

The Sybil Attack Large-scale peer-to-peer systems facesecurity threats from faulty or hostile remotecomputing elements. To resist these threats, manysuch systems employ redundancy. However, if asingle faulty entity can present multiple identities,it can control a substantial fraction of the system,thereby undermining this redundancy. Oneapproach to preventing these &quot;Sybil attacks&quot; is tohave a trusted agency certify identities. Thispaper shows that, without a logically centralizedauthority, Sybil...

BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation Human evaluations of machine translation are extensive but expensive. Human evaluations can take months to finish and involve human labor that can not be reused. We propose a method of automatic machine translation evaluation that is quick, inexpensive, and language-independent, that correlates highly with human evaluation, and that has little marginal cost per run. We present this method as an automated understudy to skilled human judges which substitutes for them when there is need for quick or frequent evaluations.

Computational thinking Summary form only given. My vision for the 21st century, Computational Thinking, will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

Fuzzy logic in control systems: fuzzy logic controller. I.

Switching between stabilizing controllers This paper deals with the problem of switching between several linear time-invariant (LTI) controllers—all of them capable of stabilizing a speci4c LTI process—in such a way that the stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed for any switching sequence. We show that it is possible to 4nd realizations for any given family of controller transfer matrices so that the closed-loop system remains stable, no matter how we switch among the controller. The motivation for this problem is the control of complex systems where con8icting requirements make a single LTI controller unsuitable. ? 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

Tabu Search - Part I

Bidirectional recurrent neural networks In the first part of this paper, a regular recurrent neural network (RNN) is extended to a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN). The BRNN can be trained without the limitation of using input information just up to a preset future frame. This is accomplished by training it simultaneously in positive and negative time direction. Structure and training procedure of the proposed network are explained. In regression and classification experiments on artificial data, the proposed structure gives better results than other approaches. For real data, classification experiments for phonemes from the TIMIT database show the same tendency. In the second part of this paper, it is shown how the proposed bidirectional structure can be easily modified to allow efficient estimation of the conditional posterior probability of complete symbol sequences without making any explicit assumption about the shape of the distribution. For this part, experiments on real data are reported

An intensive survey of fair non-repudiation protocols With the phenomenal growth of the Internet and open networks in general, security services, such as non-repudiation, become crucial to many applications. Non-repudiation services must ensure that when Alice sends some information to Bob over a network, neither Alice nor Bob can deny having participated in a part or the whole of this communication. Therefore a fair non-repudiation protocol has to generate non-repudiation of origin evidences intended to Bob, and non-repudiation of receipt evidences destined to Alice. In this paper, we clearly define the properties a fair non-repudiation protocol must respect, and give a survey of the most important non-repudiation protocols without and with trusted third party (TTP). For the later ones we discuss the evolution of the TTP's involvement and, between others, describe the most recent protocol using a transparent TTP. We also discuss some ad-hoc problems related to the management of non-repudiation evidences.

Dynamic movement and positioning of embodied agents in multiparty conversations For embodied agents to engage in realistic multiparty conversation, they must stand in appropriate places with respect to other agents and the environment. When these factors change, such as an agent joining the conversation, the agents must dynamically move to a new location and/or orientation to accommodate. This paper presents an algorithm for simulating movement of agents based on observed human behavior using techniques developed for pedestrian movement in crowd simulations. We extend a previous group conversation simulation to include an agent motion algorithm. We examine several test cases and show how the simulation generates results that mirror real-life conversation settings.

An improved genetic algorithm with conditional genetic operators and its application to set-covering problem The genetic algorithm (GA) is a popular, biologically inspired optimization method. However, in the GA there is no rule of thumb to design the GA operators and select GA parameters. Instead, trial-and-error has to be applied. In this paper we present an improved genetic algorithm in which crossover and mutation are performed conditionally instead of probability. Because there are no crossover rate and mutation rate to be selected, the proposed improved GA can be more easily applied to a problem than the conventional genetic algorithms. The proposed improved genetic algorithm is applied to solve the set-covering problem. Experimental studies show that the improved GA produces better results over the conventional one and other methods.

Lane-level traffic estimations using microscopic traffic variables This paper proposes a novel inference method to estimate lane-level traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time on road segments where local information could not be measured and assessed directly. The main contributions of the proposed method are 1) the ability to perform lane-level estimations of traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time and 2) the ability to adapt to different traffic regimes by assessing only microscopic traffic variables. We propose a modified Kriging estimation model which explicitly takes into account both spatial and temporal variability. Performance evaluations are conducted using real-world data under different traffic regimes and it is shown that the proposed method outperforms a Kalman filter-based approach.

Convolutional Neural Network-Based Classification of Driver's Emotion during Aggressive and Smooth Driving Using Multi-Modal Camera Sensors. Because aggressive driving often causes large-scale loss of life and property, techniques for advance detection of adverse driver emotional states have become important for the prevention of aggressive driving behaviors. Previous studies have primarily focused on systems for detecting aggressive driver emotion via smart-phone accelerometers and gyro-sensors, or they focused on methods of detecting physiological signals using electroencephalography (EEG) or electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors. Because EEG and ECG sensors cause discomfort to drivers and can be detached from the driver's body, it becomes difficult to focus on bio-signals to determine their emotional state. Gyro-sensors and accelerometers depend on the performance of GPS receivers and cannot be used in areas where GPS signals are blocked. Moreover, if driving on a mountain road with many quick turns, a driver's emotional state can easily be misrecognized as that of an aggressive driver. To resolve these problems, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method of detecting emotion to identify aggressive driving using input images of the driver's face, obtained using near-infrared (NIR) light and thermal camera sensors. In this research, we conducted an experiment using our own database, which provides a high classification accuracy for detecting driver emotion leading to either aggressive or smooth (i.e., relaxed) driving. Our proposed method demonstrates better performance than existing methods.

Ethical Considerations Of Applying Robots In Kindergarten Settings: Towards An Approach From A Macroperspective In child-robot interaction (cHRI) research, many studies pursue the goal to develop interactive systems that can be applied in everyday settings. For early education, increasingly, the setting of a kindergarten is targeted. However, when cHRI and research are brought into a kindergarten, a range of ethical and related procedural aspects have to be considered and dealt with. While ethical models elaborated within other human-robot interaction settings, e.g., assisted living contexts, can provide some important indicators for relevant issues, we argue that it is important to start developing a systematic approach to identify and tackle those ethical issues which rise with cHRI in kindergarten settings on a more global level and address the impact of the technology from a macroperspective beyond the effects on the individual. Based on our experience in conducting studies with children in general and pedagogical considerations on the role of the institution of kindergarten in specific, in this paper, we enfold some relevant aspects that have barely been addressed in an explicit way in current cHRI research. Four areas are analyzed and key ethical issues are identified in each area: (1) the institutional setting of a kindergarten, (2) children as a vulnerable group, (3) the caregivers' role, and (4) pedagogical concepts. With our considerations, we aim at (i) broadening the methodology of the current studies within the area of cHRI, (ii) revalidate it based on our comprehensive empirical experience with research in kindergarten settings, both laboratory and real-world contexts, and (iii) provide a framework for the development of a more systematic approach to address the ethical issues in cHRI research within kindergarten settings.

Digital watermarking: Applicability for developing trust in medical imaging workflows state of the art review. Medical images can be intentionally or unintentionally manipulated both within the secure medical system environment and outside, as images are viewed, extracted and transmitted. Many organisations have invested heavily in Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), which are intended to facilitate data security. However, it is common for images, and records, to be extracted from these for a wide range of accepted practices, such as external second opinion, transmission to another care provider, patient data request, etc. Therefore, confirming trust within medical imaging workflows has become essential. Digital watermarking has been recognised as a promising approach for ensuring the authenticity and integrity of medical images. Authenticity refers to the ability to identify the information origin and prove that the data relates to the right patient. Integrity means the capacity to ensure that the information has not been altered without authorisation.

A feature-based robust digital image watermarking scheme A robust digital image watermarking scheme that combines image feature extraction and image normalization is proposed. The goal is to resist both geometric distortion and signal processing attacks. We adopt a feature extraction method called Mexican hat wavelet scale interaction. The extracted feature points can survive a variety of attacks and be used as reference points for both watermark embedding and detection. The normalized image of an image (object) is nearly invariant with respect to rotations. As a result, the watermark detection task can be much simplified when it is applied to the normalized image. However, because image normalization is sensitive to image local variation, we apply image normalization to nonoverlapped image disks separately. The disks are centered at the extracted feature points. Several copies of a 16-bit watermark sequence are embedded in the original image to improve the robustness of watermarks. Simulation results show that our scheme can survive low-quality JPEG compression, color reduction, sharpening, Gaussian filtering, median filtering, row or column removal, shearing, rotation, local warping, cropping, and linear geometric transformations.

Imperceptible visible watermarking based on postcamera histogram operation real-world scene captured via digital devices, such as a digital still camera, video recorder and mobile device, is a common behavior in recent decades. With the increasing availability, reproduction and sharing of media, the intellectual property of digital media is incapable of guaranty. To claim the ownership of digital camera media, the imperceptible visible watermarking (IVW) mechanism was designed based on the observation that most camera devices contain the postcamera histogram operation. The IVW approach can achieve advantages both the content readability of invisible watermarking methodology and the visual ownership identification of visible watermarking methodology. The computational complexity of IVW is low and can be effectively applied to almost any of the digital electronic devices when capturing the real-world scene without additional instruments. The following results and analysis demonstrate the novel scheme is effective and applicable for versatile images and videos captured.

A robust medical image watermarking against salt and pepper noise for brain MRI images. The ever-growing numbers of medical digital images and the need to share them among specialists and hospitals for better and more accurate diagnosis require that patients' privacy be protected. During the transmission of medical images between hospitals or specialists through the network, the main priority is to protect a patient's documents against any act of tampering by unauthorised individuals. Because of this, there is a need for medical image authentication scheme to enable proper diagnosis on patient. In addition, medical images are also susceptible to salt and pepper impulse noise through the transmission in communication channels. This noise may also be intentionally used by the invaders to corrupt the embedded watermarks inside the medical images. A common drawback of existing watermarking methods is their weakness against salt and pepper noise. The research carried out in this work addresses the issue of designing a new watermarking method that can withstand high density of salt and pepper noise for brain MRI images. For this purpose, combination of a spatial domain watermarking method, channel coding and noise filtering schemes are used. The region of non-interest (RONI) of MRI images from five different databases are used as embedding area and electronic patient record (EPR) is considered as embedded data. The quality of watermarked image is evaluated using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), and the accuracy of the extracted watermark is assessed in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER).

An improved DWT-SVD domain watermarking for medical information security. Exchange of patient record over network required a technique to guarantee security and privacy for tele-health services. This paper presents an improved watermarking technique capable of providing protection of patient data by embedding multi-watermarks in medical cover image using DWT-SVD domain. Prior to embedding, Hamming code is applied to text watermark in order to reduce channel noise distortion for the sensitive data. After embedding, the watermarked medical image is encrypted then compressed. Out of two encryption method and three compression scheme tested, combination of Chaotic-LZW shows the best performance. However, HyperChaotic-LZW combination is more robust against Gaussian, JPEG compression, speckle noise and histogram equalization attacks. We illustrate the good results in terms of objective and subjective evaluation, and verify its robustness for various attacks while maintaining imperceptibility, security and compression ratio. Experimental results demonstrate that the suggested technique archives high robustness against attacks in comparison to the other scheme for medical images.

An intelligent and blind image watermarking scheme based on hybrid SVD transforms using human visual system characteristics This paper presents a new intelligent image watermarking scheme based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and singular values decomposition (SVD) using human visual system (HVS) and particle swarm optimization (PSO). The cover image is transformed by one-level (DWT) and subsequently the LL sub-band of (DWT) transformed image is chosen for embedding. To achieve the highest possible visual quality, the embedding regions are selected based on (HVS). After applying (SVD) on the selected regions, every two watermark bits are embedded indirectly into the U and $$V^{t}$$ components of SVD decomposition of the selected regions, instead of embedding one watermark bit into the U component and compensating on the $$V^{t}$$ component that results in twice capacity and reasonable imperceptibility. In addition, for increasing the robustness without losing the transparency, the scaling factors are chosen automatically by (PSO) based on the attacks test results and predefined conditions, instead of using fixed or manually set scaling factors for all different cover images. Experimental and comparative results demonstrated the stability and improved performance of the proposed scheme compared to its parents watermarking schemes. Moreover, the proposed scheme is free of false positive detection error.

The Sybil Attack Large-scale peer-to-peer systems facesecurity threats from faulty or hostile remotecomputing elements. To resist these threats, manysuch systems employ redundancy. However, if asingle faulty entity can present multiple identities,it can control a substantial fraction of the system,thereby undermining this redundancy. Oneapproach to preventing these &quot;Sybil attacks&quot; is tohave a trusted agency certify identities. Thispaper shows that, without a logically centralizedauthority, Sybil...

Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks. Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are powerful models that have achieved excellent performance on difficult learning tasks. Although DNNs work well whenever large labeled training sets are available, they cannot be used to map sequences to sequences. In this paper, we present a general end-to-end approach to sequence learning that makes minimal assumptions on the sequence structure. Our method uses a multilayered Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to map the input sequence to a vector of a fixed dimensionality, and then another deep LSTM to decode the target sequence from the vector. Our main result is that on an English to French translation task from the WMT-14 dataset, the translations produced by the LSTM achieve a BLEU score of 34.8 on the entire test set, where the LSTM's BLEU score was penalized on out-of-vocabulary words. Additionally, the LSTM did not have difficulty on long sentences. For comparison, a phrase-based SMT system achieves a BLEU score of 33.3 on the same dataset. When we used the LSTM to rerank the 1000 hypotheses produced by the aforementioned SMT system, its BLEU score increases to 36.5, which is close to the previous state of the art. The LSTM also learned sensible phrase and sentence representations that are sensitive to word order and are relatively invariant to the active and the passive voice. Finally, we found that reversing the order of the words in all source sentences (but not target sentences) improved the LSTM's performance markedly, because doing so introduced many short term dependencies between the source and the target sentence which made the optimization problem easier.

Toward Integrating Vehicular Clouds with IoT for Smart City Services Vehicular ad hoc networks, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things are among the emerging technology enablers offering a wide array of new application possibilities in smart urban spaces. These applications consist of smart building automation systems, healthcare monitoring systems, and intelligent and connected transportation, among others. The integration of IoT-based vehicular technologies will enrich services that are eventually going to ignite the proliferation of exciting and even more advanced technological marvels. However, depending on different requirements and design models for networking and architecture, such integration needs the development of newer communication architectures and frameworks. This work proposes a novel framework for architectural and communication design to effectively integrate vehicular networking clouds with IoT, referred to as VCoT, to materialize new applications that provision various IoT services through vehicular clouds. In this article, we particularly put emphasis on smart city applications deployed, operated, and controlled through LoRaWAN-based vehicular networks. LoraWAN, being a new technology, provides efficient and long-range communication possibilities. The article also discusses possible research issues in such an integration including data aggregation, security, privacy, data quality, and network coverage. These issues must be addressed in order to realize the VCoT paradigm deployment, and to provide insights for investors and key stakeholders in VCoT service provisioning. The article presents deep insights for different real-world application scenarios (i.e., smart homes, intelligent traffic light, and smart city) using VCoT for general control and automation along with their associated challenges. It also presents initial insights, through preliminary results, regarding data and resource management in IoT-based resource constrained environments through vehicular clouds.

Multivariate Short-Term Traffic Flow Forecasting Using Time-Series Analysis Existing time-series models that are used for short-term traffic condition forecasting are mostly univariate in nature. Generally, the extension of existing univariate time-series models to a multivariate regime involves huge computational complexities. A different class of time-series models called structural time-series model (STM) (in its multivariate form) has been introduced in this paper to develop a parsimonious and computationally simple multivariate short-term traffic condition forecasting algorithm. The different components of a time-series data set such as trend, seasonal, cyclical, and calendar variations can separately be modeled in STM methodology. A case study at the Dublin, Ireland, city center with serious traffic congestion is performed to illustrate the forecasting strategy. The results indicate that the proposed forecasting algorithm is an effective approach in predicting real-time traffic flow at multiple junctions within an urban transport network.

State resetting for bumpless switching in supervisory control In this paper the realization and implementation of a multi-controller scheme made of a finite set of linear single-input-single-output controllers, possibly having different state dimensions, is studied. The supervisory control framework is considered, namely a minimal parameter dependent realization of the set of controllers such that all controllers share the same state space is used. A specific state resetting strategy based on the behavioral approach to system theory is developed in order to master the transient upon controller switching.

G2-type SRMPC scheme for synchronous manipulation of two redundant robot arms. In this paper, to remedy the joint-angle drift phenomenon for manipulation of two redundant robot arms, a novel scheme for simultaneous repetitive motion planning and control (SRMPC) at the joint-acceleration level is proposed, which consists of two subschemes. To do so, the performance index of each SRMPC subscheme is derived and designed by employing the gradient dynamics twice, of which a convergence theorem and its proof are presented. In addition, for improving the accuracy of the motion planning and control, position error, and velocity, error feedbacks are incorporated into the forward kinematics equation and analyzed via Zhang neural-dynamics method. Then the two subschemes are simultaneously reformulated as two quadratic programs (QPs), which are finally unified into one QP problem. Furthermore, a piecewise-linear projection equation-based neural network (PLPENN) is used to solve the unified QP problem, which can handle the strictly convex QP problem in an inverse-free manner. More importantly, via such a unified QP formulation and the corresponding PLPENN solver, the synchronism of two redundant robot arms is guaranteed. Finally, two given tasks are fulfilled by 2 three-link and 2 five-link planar robot arms, respectively. Computer-simulation results validate the efficacy and accuracy of the SRMPC scheme and the corresponding PLPENN solver for synchronous manipulation of two redundant robot arms.

Modeling taxi driver anticipatory behavior. As part of a wider behavioral agent-based model that simulates taxi drivers' dynamic passenger-finding behavior under uncertainty, we present a model of strategic behavior of taxi drivers in anticipation of substantial time varying demand at locations such as airports and major train stations. The model assumes that, considering a particular decision horizon, a taxi driver decides to transfer to such a destination based on a reward function. The dynamic uncertainty of demand is captured by a time dependent pick-up probability, which is a cumulative distribution function of waiting time. The model allows for information learning by which taxi drivers update their beliefs from past experiences. A simulation on a real road network, applied to test the model, indicates that the formulated model dynamically improves passenger-finding strategies at the airport. Taxi drivers learn when to transfer to the airport in anticipation of the time-varying demand at the airport to minimize their waiting time.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Forecasting holiday daily tourist flow based on seasonal support vector regression with adaptive genetic algorithm. •The model of support vector regression with adaptive genetic algorithm and the seasonal mechanism is proposed.•Parameters selection and seasonal adjustment should be carefully selected.•We focus on latest and representative holiday daily data in China.•Two experiments are used to prove the effect of the model.•The AGASSVR is superior to AGA-SVR and BPNN.

Regression conformal prediction with random forests Regression conformal prediction produces prediction intervals that are valid, i.e., the probability of excluding the correct target value is bounded by a predefined confidence level. The most important criterion when comparing conformal regressors is efficiency; the prediction intervals should be as tight (informative) as possible. In this study, the use of random forests as the underlying model for regression conformal prediction is investigated and compared to existing state-of-the-art techniques, which are based on neural networks and k-nearest neighbors. In addition to their robust predictive performance, random forests allow for determining the size of the prediction intervals by using out-of-bag estimates instead of requiring a separate calibration set. An extensive empirical investigation, using 33 publicly available data sets, was undertaken to compare the use of random forests to existing state-of-the-art conformal predictors. The results show that the suggested approach, on almost all confidence levels and using both standard and normalized nonconformity functions, produced significantly more efficient conformal predictors than the existing alternatives.

Bayesian Particle Tracking of Traffic Flows. We develop a Bayesian particle filter for tracking traffic flows that is capable of capturing non-linearities and discontinuities present in flow dynamics. Our model includes a hidden state variable that captures sudden regime shifts between traffic free flow, breakdown, and recovery. We develop an efficient particle learning algorithm for real time online inference of states and parameters. This ...

Streaming Adaptation of Deep Forecasting Models using Adaptive Recurrent Units. We present ARU, an Adaptive Recurrent Unit for streaming adaptation of deep globally trained time-series forecasting models. The ARU combines the advantages of learning complex data transformations across multiple time series from deep global models, with per-series localization offered by closed-form linear models. Unlike existing methods of adaptation that are either memory-intensive or non-responsive after training, ARUs require only fixed sized state and adapt to streaming data via an easy RNN-like update operation. The core principle driving ARU is simple --- maintain sufficient statistics of conditional Gaussian distributions and use them to compute local parameters in closed form. Our contribution is in embedding such local linear models in globally trained deep models while allowing end-to-end training on the one hand, and easy RNN-like updates on the other. Across several datasets we show that ARU is more effective than recently proposed local adaptation methods that tax the global network to compute local parameters.

AutoST: Efficient Neural Architecture Search for Spatio-Temporal Prediction Spatio-temporal (ST) prediction (e.g. crowd flow prediction) is of great importance in a wide range of smart city applications from urban planning, intelligent transportation and public safety. Recently, many deep neural network models have been proposed to make accurate prediction. However, manually designing neural networks requires amount of expert efforts and ST domain knowledge. How to automatically construct a general neural network for diverse spatio-temporal predication tasks in cities? In this paper, we study Neural Architecture Search (NAS) for spatio-temporal prediction and propose an efficient spatio-temporal neural architecture search method, entitled AutoST. To our best knowledge, the search space is an important human prior to the success of NAS in different applications while current NAS models concentrated on optimizing search strategy in the fixed search space. Thus, we design a novel search space tailored for ST-domain which consists of two categories of components: (i) optional convolution operations at each layer to automatically extract multi-range spatio-temporal dependencies; (ii) learnable skip connections among layers to dynamically fuse low- and high-level ST-features. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-word spatio-temporal prediction tasks, including taxi flow and crowd flow, showing that the learned network architectures can significantly improve the performance of representative ST neural network models. Furthermore, our proposed efficient NAS approach searches 8-10x faster than state-of-the-art NAS approaches, demonstrating the efficiency and effectiveness of AutoST.

Learning Interpretable Deep State Space Model for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting. Probabilistic time series forecasting involves estimating the distribution of future based on its history, which is essential for risk management in downstream decision-making. We propose a deep state space model for probabilistic time series forecasting whereby the non-linear emission model and transition model are parameterized by networks and the dependency is modeled by recurrent neural nets. We take the automatic relevance determination (ARD) view and devise a network to exploit the exogenous variables in addition to time series. In particular, our ARD network can incorporate the uncertainty of the exogenous variables and eventually helps identify useful exogenous variables and suppress those irrelevant for forecasting. The distribution of multi-step ahead forecasts are approximated by Monte Carlo simulation. We show in experiments that our model produces accurate and sharp probabilistic forecasts. The estimated uncertainty of our forecasting also realistically increases over time, in a spontaneous manner.

Transfer Knowledge between Cities The rapid urbanization has motivated extensive research on urban computing. It is critical for urban computing tasks to unlock the power of the diversity of data modalities generated by different sources in urban spaces, such as vehicles and humans. However, we are more likely to encounter the label scarcity problem and the data insufficiency problem when solving an urban computing task in a city where services and infrastructures are not ready or just built. In this paper, we propose a FLexible multimOdal tRAnsfer Learning (FLORAL) method to transfer knowledge from a city where there exist sufficient multimodal data and labels, to this kind of cities to fully alleviate the two problems. FLORAL learns semantically related dictionaries for multiple modalities from a source domain, and simultaneously transfers the dictionaries and labelled instances from the source into a target domain. We evaluate the proposed method with a case study of air quality prediction.

Space-time modeling of traffic flow. This paper discusses the application of space-time autoregressive integrated moving average (STARIMA) methodology for representing traffic flow patterns. Traffic flow data are in the form of spatial time series and are collected at specific locations at constant intervals of time. Important spatial characteristics of the space-time process are incorporated in the STARIMA model through the use of weighting matrices estimated on the basis of the distances among the various locations where data are collected. These matrices distinguish the space-time approach from the vector autoregressive moving average (VARMA) methodology and enable the model builders to control the number of the parameters that have to be estimated. The proposed models can be used for short-term forecasting of space-time stationary traffic-flow processes and for assessing the impact of traffic-flow changes on other parts of the network. The three-stage iterative space-time model building procedure is illustrated using 7.5min average traffic flow data for a set of 25 loop-detectors located at roads that direct to the centre of the city of Athens, Greece. Data for two months with different traffic-flow characteristics are modelled in order to determine the stability of the parameter estimation.

Model-based periodic event-triggered control for linear systems Periodic event-triggered control (PETC) is a control strategy that combines ideas from conventional periodic sampled-data control and event-triggered control. By communicating periodically sampled sensor and controller data only when needed to guarantee stability or performance properties, PETC is capable of reducing the number of transmissions significantly, while still retaining a satisfactory closed-loop behavior. In this paper, we will study observer-based controllers for linear systems and propose advanced event-triggering mechanisms (ETMs) that will reduce communication in both the sensor-to-controller channels and the controller-to-actuator channels. By exploiting model-based computations, the new classes of ETMs will outperform existing ETMs in the literature. To model and analyze the proposed classes of ETMs, we present two frameworks based on perturbed linear and piecewise linear systems, leading to conditions for global exponential stability and @?"2-gain performance of the resulting closed-loop systems in terms of linear matrix inequalities. The proposed analysis frameworks can be used to make tradeoffs between the network utilization on the one hand and the performance in terms of @?"2-gains on the other. In addition, we will show that the closed-loop performance realized by an observer-based controller, implemented in a conventional periodic time-triggered fashion, can be recovered arbitrarily closely by a PETC implementation. This provides a justification for emulation-based design. Next to centralized model-based ETMs, we will also provide a decentralized setup suitable for large-scale systems, where sensors and actuators are physically distributed over a wide area. The improvements realized by the proposed model-based ETMs will be demonstrated using numerical examples.

Affective social robots For human-robot interaction to proceed in a smooth, natural manner, robots must adhere to human social norms. One such human convention is the use of expressive moods and emotions as an integral part of social interaction. Such expressions are used to convey messages such as ''I'm happy to see you'' or ''I want to be comforted,'' and people's long-term relationships depend heavily on shared emotional experiences. Thus, we have developed an affective model for social robots. This generative model attempts to create natural, human-like affect and includes distinctions between immediate emotional responses, the overall mood of the robot, and long-term attitudes toward each visitor to the robot, with a focus on developing long-term human-robot relationships. This paper presents the general affect model as well as particular details of our implementation of the model on one robot, the Roboceptionist. In addition, we present findings from two studies that demonstrate the model's potential.

Rich Models for Steganalysis of Digital Images We describe a novel general strategy for building steganography detectors for digital images. The process starts with assembling a rich model of the noise component as a union of many diverse submodels formed by joint distributions of neighboring samples from quantized image noise residuals obtained using linear and nonlinear high-pass filters. In contrast to previous approaches, we make the model assembly a part of the training process driven by samples drawn from the corresponding cover- and stego-sources. Ensemble classifiers are used to assemble the model as well as the final steganalyzer due to their low computational complexity and ability to efficiently work with high-dimensional feature spaces and large training sets. We demonstrate the proposed framework on three steganographic algorithms designed to hide messages in images represented in the spatial domain: HUGO, edge-adaptive algorithm by Luo , and optimally coded ternary $\\pm {\\hbox{1}}$ embedding. For each algorithm, we apply a simple submodel-selection technique to increase the detection accuracy per model dimensionality and show how the detection saturates with increasing complexity of the rich model. By observing the differences between how different submodels engage in detection, an interesting interplay between the embedding and detection is revealed. Steganalysis built around rich image models combined with ensemble classifiers is a promising direction towards automatizing steganalysis for a wide spectrum of steganographic schemes.

Heterogeneous ensemble for feature drifts in data streams The nature of data streams requires classification algorithms to be real-time, efficient, and able to cope with high-dimensional data that are continuously arriving. It is a known fact that in high-dimensional datasets, not all features are critical for training a classifier. To improve the performance of data stream classification, we propose an algorithm called HEFT-Stream (H eterogeneous E nsemble with F eature drifT for Data Streams ) that incorporates feature selection into a heterogeneous ensemble to adapt to different types of concept drifts. As an example of the proposed framework, we first modify the FCBF [13] algorithm so that it dynamically update the relevant feature subsets for data streams. Next, a heterogeneous ensemble is constructed based on different online classifiers, including Online Naive Bayes and CVFDT [5]. Empirical results show that our ensemble classifier outperforms state-of-the-art ensemble classifiers (AWE [15] and OnlineBagging [21]) in terms of accuracy, speed, and scalability. The success of HEFT-Stream opens new research directions in understanding the relationship between feature selection techniques and ensemble learning to achieve better classification performance.

Orientation-aware RFID tracking with centimeter-level accuracy. RFID tracking attracts a lot of research efforts in recent years. Most of the existing approaches, however, adopt an orientation-oblivious model. When tracking a target whose orientation changes, those approaches suffer from serious accuracy degradation. In order to achieve target tracking with pervasive applicability in various scenarios, we in this paper propose OmniTrack, an orientation-aware RFID tracking approach. Our study discovers the linear relationship between the tag orientation and the phase change of the backscattered signals. Based on this finding, we propose an orientation-aware phase model to explicitly quantify the respective impact of the read-tag distance and the tag's orientation. OmniTrack addresses practical challenges in tracking the location and orientation of a mobile tag. Our experimental results demonstrate that OmniTrack achieves centimeter-level location accuracy and has significant advantages in tracking targets with varing orientations, compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Energy-Efficient Multidimensional Trajectory of UAV-Aided IoT Networks With Reinforcement Learning This article proposes a multidimensional search space (or directional space) with more degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) to increase the energy efficiency of limited-battery-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in the Internet of Things (IoT) data collection scenario. In this article, the UAV navigates from the initial to the goal point while collecting data from IoT sensors on the ground. Owing to the limited battery power of UAVs, an optimized trajectory is a crucial practical problem. Based on the available directional space, the direction of the UAV related to the navigation trajectory is optimized using reinforcement learning (RL). The objective of RL is to maximize the energy efficiency of the UAV as a long-term reward by selecting the optimal direction. Moreover, a practical energy consumption model and environment are presented in this article. Simulation results verified that the proposed multidimensional trajectory for UAV achieves higher energy efficiency compared with benchmark models.

The Sybil Attack Large-scale peer-to-peer systems facesecurity threats from faulty or hostile remotecomputing elements. To resist these threats, manysuch systems employ redundancy. However, if asingle faulty entity can present multiple identities,it can control a substantial fraction of the system,thereby undermining this redundancy. Oneapproach to preventing these &quot;Sybil attacks&quot; is tohave a trusted agency certify identities. Thispaper shows that, without a logically centralizedauthority, Sybil...

BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation Human evaluations of machine translation are extensive but expensive. Human evaluations can take months to finish and involve human labor that can not be reused. We propose a method of automatic machine translation evaluation that is quick, inexpensive, and language-independent, that correlates highly with human evaluation, and that has little marginal cost per run. We present this method as an automated understudy to skilled human judges which substitutes for them when there is need for quick or frequent evaluations.

Computational thinking Summary form only given. My vision for the 21st century, Computational Thinking, will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

Fuzzy logic in control systems: fuzzy logic controller. I.

Switching between stabilizing controllers This paper deals with the problem of switching between several linear time-invariant (LTI) controllers—all of them capable of stabilizing a speci4c LTI process—in such a way that the stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed for any switching sequence. We show that it is possible to 4nd realizations for any given family of controller transfer matrices so that the closed-loop system remains stable, no matter how we switch among the controller. The motivation for this problem is the control of complex systems where con8icting requirements make a single LTI controller unsuitable. ? 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

Tabu Search - Part I

Bidirectional recurrent neural networks In the first part of this paper, a regular recurrent neural network (RNN) is extended to a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN). The BRNN can be trained without the limitation of using input information just up to a preset future frame. This is accomplished by training it simultaneously in positive and negative time direction. Structure and training procedure of the proposed network are explained. In regression and classification experiments on artificial data, the proposed structure gives better results than other approaches. For real data, classification experiments for phonemes from the TIMIT database show the same tendency. In the second part of this paper, it is shown how the proposed bidirectional structure can be easily modified to allow efficient estimation of the conditional posterior probability of complete symbol sequences without making any explicit assumption about the shape of the distribution. For this part, experiments on real data are reported

An intensive survey of fair non-repudiation protocols With the phenomenal growth of the Internet and open networks in general, security services, such as non-repudiation, become crucial to many applications. Non-repudiation services must ensure that when Alice sends some information to Bob over a network, neither Alice nor Bob can deny having participated in a part or the whole of this communication. Therefore a fair non-repudiation protocol has to generate non-repudiation of origin evidences intended to Bob, and non-repudiation of receipt evidences destined to Alice. In this paper, we clearly define the properties a fair non-repudiation protocol must respect, and give a survey of the most important non-repudiation protocols without and with trusted third party (TTP). For the later ones we discuss the evolution of the TTP's involvement and, between others, describe the most recent protocol using a transparent TTP. We also discuss some ad-hoc problems related to the management of non-repudiation evidences.

Dynamic movement and positioning of embodied agents in multiparty conversations For embodied agents to engage in realistic multiparty conversation, they must stand in appropriate places with respect to other agents and the environment. When these factors change, such as an agent joining the conversation, the agents must dynamically move to a new location and/or orientation to accommodate. This paper presents an algorithm for simulating movement of agents based on observed human behavior using techniques developed for pedestrian movement in crowd simulations. We extend a previous group conversation simulation to include an agent motion algorithm. We examine several test cases and show how the simulation generates results that mirror real-life conversation settings.

An improved genetic algorithm with conditional genetic operators and its application to set-covering problem The genetic algorithm (GA) is a popular, biologically inspired optimization method. However, in the GA there is no rule of thumb to design the GA operators and select GA parameters. Instead, trial-and-error has to be applied. In this paper we present an improved genetic algorithm in which crossover and mutation are performed conditionally instead of probability. Because there are no crossover rate and mutation rate to be selected, the proposed improved GA can be more easily applied to a problem than the conventional genetic algorithms. The proposed improved genetic algorithm is applied to solve the set-covering problem. Experimental studies show that the improved GA produces better results over the conventional one and other methods.

Lane-level traffic estimations using microscopic traffic variables This paper proposes a novel inference method to estimate lane-level traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time on road segments where local information could not be measured and assessed directly. The main contributions of the proposed method are 1) the ability to perform lane-level estimations of traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time and 2) the ability to adapt to different traffic regimes by assessing only microscopic traffic variables. We propose a modified Kriging estimation model which explicitly takes into account both spatial and temporal variability. Performance evaluations are conducted using real-world data under different traffic regimes and it is shown that the proposed method outperforms a Kalman filter-based approach.

Convolutional Neural Network-Based Classification of Driver's Emotion during Aggressive and Smooth Driving Using Multi-Modal Camera Sensors. Because aggressive driving often causes large-scale loss of life and property, techniques for advance detection of adverse driver emotional states have become important for the prevention of aggressive driving behaviors. Previous studies have primarily focused on systems for detecting aggressive driver emotion via smart-phone accelerometers and gyro-sensors, or they focused on methods of detecting physiological signals using electroencephalography (EEG) or electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors. Because EEG and ECG sensors cause discomfort to drivers and can be detached from the driver's body, it becomes difficult to focus on bio-signals to determine their emotional state. Gyro-sensors and accelerometers depend on the performance of GPS receivers and cannot be used in areas where GPS signals are blocked. Moreover, if driving on a mountain road with many quick turns, a driver's emotional state can easily be misrecognized as that of an aggressive driver. To resolve these problems, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method of detecting emotion to identify aggressive driving using input images of the driver's face, obtained using near-infrared (NIR) light and thermal camera sensors. In this research, we conducted an experiment using our own database, which provides a high classification accuracy for detecting driver emotion leading to either aggressive or smooth (i.e., relaxed) driving. Our proposed method demonstrates better performance than existing methods.

Ethical Considerations Of Applying Robots In Kindergarten Settings: Towards An Approach From A Macroperspective In child-robot interaction (cHRI) research, many studies pursue the goal to develop interactive systems that can be applied in everyday settings. For early education, increasingly, the setting of a kindergarten is targeted. However, when cHRI and research are brought into a kindergarten, a range of ethical and related procedural aspects have to be considered and dealt with. While ethical models elaborated within other human-robot interaction settings, e.g., assisted living contexts, can provide some important indicators for relevant issues, we argue that it is important to start developing a systematic approach to identify and tackle those ethical issues which rise with cHRI in kindergarten settings on a more global level and address the impact of the technology from a macroperspective beyond the effects on the individual. Based on our experience in conducting studies with children in general and pedagogical considerations on the role of the institution of kindergarten in specific, in this paper, we enfold some relevant aspects that have barely been addressed in an explicit way in current cHRI research. Four areas are analyzed and key ethical issues are identified in each area: (1) the institutional setting of a kindergarten, (2) children as a vulnerable group, (3) the caregivers' role, and (4) pedagogical concepts. With our considerations, we aim at (i) broadening the methodology of the current studies within the area of cHRI, (ii) revalidate it based on our comprehensive empirical experience with research in kindergarten settings, both laboratory and real-world contexts, and (iii) provide a framework for the development of a more systematic approach to address the ethical issues in cHRI research within kindergarten settings.

Deal or No Deal? End-to-End Learning of Negotiation Dialogues. Much of human dialogue occurs in semi-cooperative settings, where agents with different goals attempt to agree on common decisions. Negotiations require complex communication and reasoning skills, but success is easy to measure, making this an interesting task for AI. We gather a large dataset of human-human negotiations on a multi-issue bargaining task, where agents who cannot observe each otheru0027s reward functions must reach an agreement (or a deal) via natural language dialogue. For the first time, we show it is possible to train end-to-end models for negotiation, which must learn both linguistic and reasoning skills with no annotated dialogue states. We also introduce dialogue rollouts, in which the model plans ahead by simulating possible complete continuations of the conversation, and find that this technique dramatically improves performance. Our code and dataset are publicly available (this https URL).

A deceptive robot referee in a multiplayer gaming environment We explore deception in the context of a multi-player robotic game. The robot does not participate as a competitor, but is in charge of declaring who wins or loses every round. The robot was designed to deceive game players by imperceptibly balancing how much they won, with the hope this behavior would make them play longer and with more interest. Inducing false belief about who wins the game was accomplished by leveraging paradigms about robot behavior and their better perceptual abilities. There were participants who found the balancing strategy favorable after being debriefed, and others who showed less interest mostly because of their perceived level of unfairness. Trust, suspicion, motivation, and appeal were evaluated by altering the robot behavior during gameplay. Post-briefing results include the finding that participants are more accepting of the use of lying by our robot as opposed to robots in general. Factors pertaining to gameplay, this robot, and deceptive robotics in general are also discussed.

“I Don't Believe You”: Investigating the Effects of Robot Trust Violation and Repair When a robot breaks a person's trust by making a mistake or failing, continued interaction will depend heavily on how the robot repairs the trust that was broken. Prior work in psychology has demonstrated that both the trust violation framing and the trust repair strategy influence how effectively trust can be restored. We investigate trust repair between a human and a robot in the context of a competitive game, where a robot tries to restore a human's trust after a broken promise, using either a competence or integrity trust violation framing and either an apology or denial trust repair strategy. Results from a 2×2 between-subjects study (n = 82) show that participants interacting with a robot employing the integrity trust violation framing and the denial trust repair strategy are significantly more likely to exhibit behavioral retaliation toward the robot. In the Dyadic Trust Scale survey, an interaction between trust violation framing and trust repair strategy was observed. Our results demonstrate the importance of considering both trust violation framing and trust repair strategy choice when designing robots to repair trust. We also discuss the influence of human-to-robot promises and ethical considerations when framing and repairing trust between a human and robot.

Playing the Blame Game with Robots ABSTRACTRecent research shows - somewhat astonishingly - that people are willing to ascribe moral blame to AI-driven systems when they cause harm [1]-[4]. In this paper, we explore the moral-psychological underpinnings of these findings. Our hypothesis was that the reason why people ascribe moral blame to AI systems is that they consider them capable of entertaining inculpating mental states (what is called mens rea in the law). To explore this hypothesis, we created a scenario in which an AI system runs a risk of poisoning people by using a novel type of fertilizer. Manipulating the computational (or quasi-cognitive) abilities of the AI system in a between-subjects design, we tested whether people's willingness to ascribe knowledge of a substantial risk of harm (i.e., recklessness) and blame to the AI system. Furthermore, we investigated whether the ascription of recklessness and blame to the AI system would influence the perceived blameworthiness of the system's user (or owner). In an experiment with 347 participants, we found (i) that people are willing to ascribe blame to AI systems in contexts of recklessness, (ii) that blame ascriptions depend strongly on the willingness to attribute recklessness and (iii) that the latter, in turn, depends on the perceived "cognitive" capacities of the system. Furthermore, our results suggest (iv) that the higher the computational sophistication of the AI system, the more blame is shifted from the human user to the AI system.

The benefit of being physically present: A survey of experimental works comparing copresent robots, telepresent robots and virtual agents. The effects of physical embodiment and physical presence were explored through a survey of 33 experimental works comparing how people interacted with physical robots and virtual agents. A qualitative assessment of the direction of quantitative effects demonstrated that robots were more persuasive and perceived more positively when physically present in a user׳s environment than when digitally-displayed on a screen either as a video feed of the same robot or as a virtual character analog; robots also led to better user performance when they were collocated as opposed to shown via video on a screen. However, participants did not respond differently to physical robots and virtual agents when both were displayed digitally on a screen – suggesting that physical presence, rather than physical embodiment, characterizes people׳s responses to social robots. Implications for understanding psychological response to physical and virtual agents and for methodological design are discussed.

Designing and implementing transparency for real time inspection of autonomous robots. The EPSRC's Principles of Robotics advises the implementation of transparency in robotic systems, however research related to AI transparency is in its infancy. This paper introduces the reader of the importance of having transparent inspection of intelligent agents and provides guidance for good practice when developing such agents. By considering and expanding upon other prominent definitions found in literature, we provide a robust definition of transparency as a mechanism to expose the decision-making of a robot. The paper continues by addressing potential design decisions developers need to consider when designing and developing transparent systems. Finally, we describe our new interactive intelligence editor, designed to visualise, develop and debug real-time intelligence.

A survey on ear biometrics Recognizing people by their ear has recently received significant attention in the literature. Several reasons account for this trend: first, ear recognition does not suffer from some problems associated with other non-contact biometrics, such as face recognition; second, it is the most promising candidate for combination with the face in the context of multi-pose face recognition; and third, the ear can be used for human recognition in surveillance videos where the face may be occluded completely or in part. Further, the ear appears to degrade little with age. Even though current ear detection and recognition systems have reached a certain level of maturity, their success is limited to controlled indoor conditions. In addition to variation in illumination, other open research problems include hair occlusion, earprint forensics, ear symmetry, ear classification, and ear individuality. This article provides a detailed survey of research conducted in ear detection and recognition. It provides an up-to-date review of the existing literature revealing the current state-of-art for not only those who are working in this area but also for those who might exploit this new approach. Furthermore, it offers insights into some unsolved ear recognition problems as well as ear databases available for researchers.

DeepFace: Closing the Gap to Human-Level Performance in Face Verification In modern face recognition, the conventional pipeline consists of four stages: detect => align => represent => classify. We revisit both the alignment step and the representation step by employing explicit 3D face modeling in order to apply a piecewise affine transformation, and derive a face representation from a nine-layer deep neural network. This deep network involves more than 120 million parameters using several locally connected layers without weight sharing, rather than the standard convolutional layers. Thus we trained it on the largest facial dataset to-date, an identity labeled dataset of four million facial images belonging to more than 4, 000 identities. The learned representations coupling the accurate model-based alignment with the large facial database generalize remarkably well to faces in unconstrained environments, even with a simple classifier. Our method reaches an accuracy of 97.35% on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, reducing the error of the current state of the art by more than 27%, closely approaching human-level performance.

Markov games as a framework for multi-agent reinforcement learning In the Markov decision process (MDP) formalization of reinforcement learning, a single adaptive agent interacts with an environment defined by a probabilistic transition function. In this solipsis-tic view, secondary agents can only be part of the environment and are therefore fixed in their behavior. The framework of Markov games allows us to widen this view to include multiple adaptive agents with interacting or competing goals. This paper considers a step in this direction in which exactly two agents with diametrically opposed goals share an environment. It describes a Q-learning-like algorithm for finding optimal policies and demonstrates its application to a simple two-player game in which the optimal policy is probabilistic.

Scalable and efficient provable data possession. Storage outsourcing is a rising trend which prompts a number of interesting security issues, many of which have been extensively investigated in the past. However, Provable Data Possession (PDP) is a topic that has only recently appeared in the research literature. The main issue is how to frequently, efficiently and securely verify that a storage server is faithfully storing its client's (potentially very large) outsourced data. The storage server is assumed to be untrusted in terms of both security and reliability. (In other words, it might maliciously or accidentally erase hosted data; it might also relegate it to slow or off-line storage.) The problem is exacerbated by the client being a small computing device with limited resources. Prior work has addressed this problem using either public key cryptography or requiring the client to outsource its data in encrypted form. In this paper, we construct a highly efficient and provably secure PDP technique based entirely on symmetric key cryptography, while not requiring any bulk encryption. Also, in contrast with its predecessors, our PDP technique allows outsourcing of dynamic data, i.e, it efficiently supports operations, such as block modification, deletion and append.

On controller initialization in multivariable switching systems We consider a class of switched systems which consists of a linear MIMO and possibly unstable process in feedback interconnection with a multicontroller whose dynamics switch. It is shown how one can achieve significantly better transient performance by selecting the initial condition for every controller when it is inserted into the feedback loop. This initialization is obtained by performing the minimization of a quadratic cost function of the tracking error, controlled output, and control signal. We guarantee input-to-state stability of the closed-loop system when the average number of switches per unit of time is smaller than a specific value. If this is not the case then stability can still be achieved by adding a mild constraint to the optimization. We illustrate the use of our results in the control of a flexible beam actuated in torque. This system is unstable with two poles at the origin and contains several lightly damped modes, which can be easily excited by controller switching.

Reinforcement Q-learning for optimal tracking control of linear discrete-time systems with unknown dynamics. In this paper, a novel approach based on the Q-learning algorithm is proposed to solve the infinite-horizon linear quadratic tracker (LQT) for unknown discrete-time systems in a causal manner. It is assumed that the reference trajectory is generated by a linear command generator system. An augmented system composed of the original system and the command generator is constructed and it is shown that the value function for the LQT is quadratic in terms of the state of the augmented system. Using the quadratic structure of the value function, a Bellman equation and an augmented algebraic Riccati equation (ARE) for solving the LQT are derived. In contrast to the standard solution of the LQT, which requires the solution of an ARE and a noncausal difference equation simultaneously, in the proposed method the optimal control input is obtained by only solving an augmented ARE. A Q-learning algorithm is developed to solve online the augmented ARE without any knowledge about the system dynamics or the command generator. Convergence to the optimal solution is shown. A simulation example is used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.

A multi-objective and PSO based energy efficient path design for mobile sink in wireless sensor networks. Data collection through mobile sink (MS) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is an effective solution to the hot-spot or sink-hole problem caused by multi-hop routing using the static sink. Rendezvous point (RP) based MS path design is a common and popular technique used in this regard. However, design of the optimal path is a well-known NP-hard problem. Therefore, an evolutionary approach like multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) can prove to be a very promising and reasonable approach to solve the same. In this paper, we first present a Linear Programming formulation for the stated problem and then, propose an MOPSO-based algorithm to design an energy efficient trajectory for the MS. The algorithm is presented with an efficient particle encoding scheme and derivation of a proficient multi-objective fitness function. We use Pareto dominance in MOPSO for obtaining both local and global best guides for each particle. We carry out rigorous simulation experiments on the proposed algorithm and compare the results with two existing algorithms namely, tree cluster based data gathering algorithm (TCBDGA) and energy aware sink relocation (EASR). The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs better than both of them in terms of various performance metrics. The results are also validated through the statistical test, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and its least significant difference (LSD) post hoc analysis.

A Hierarchical Architecture Using Biased Min-Consensus for USV Path Planning This paper proposes a hierarchical architecture using the biased min-consensus (BMC) method, to solve the path planning problem of unmanned surface vessel (USV). We take the fixed-point monitoring mission as an example, where a series of intermediate monitoring points should be visited once by USV. The whole framework incorporates the low-level layer planning the standard path between any two intermediate points, and the high-level fashion determining their visiting sequence. First, the optimal standard path in terms of voyage time and risk measure is planned by the BMC protocol, given that the corresponding graph is constructed with node state and edge weight. The USV will avoid obstacles or keep a certain distance safely, and arrive at the target point quickly. It is proven theoretically that the state of the graph will converge to be stable after finite iterations, i.e., the optimal solution can be found by BMC with low calculation complexity. Second, by incorporating the constraint of intermediate points, their visiting sequence is optimized by BMC again with the reconstruction of a new virtual graph based on the former planned results. The extensive simulation results in various scenarios also validate the feasibility and effectiveness of our method for autonomous navigation.

A New Analytical Model to Study the Ionospheric Effects on VHF/UHF Wideband SAR Imaging. With a view to detecting foliage-obscured/ground-obscured targets on a global scale, low frequency (i.e., very high frequency (VHF)/ultrahigh frequency (UHF) band) and wide bandwidth is a trend in future spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system design. However, due to the dispersion of ionosphere, VHF/UHF wide bandwidth SAR signals inevitably experience adverse effects. In contrast to narr...

Prediction, Detection, and Correction of Faraday Rotation in Full-Polarimetric L-Band SAR Data With the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor PALSAR onboard the Advanced Land Observing Satellite, a new full-polarimetric spaceborne L-band SAR instrument has been launched into orbit. At L-band, Faraday rotation (FR) can reach significant values, degrading the quality of the received SAR data. One-way rotations exceeding 25 deg are likely to happen during the lifetime of PALSAR, which will significantly reduce the accuracy of geophysical parameter recovery if uncorrected. Therefore, the estimation and correction of FR effects is a prerequisite for data quality and continuity. In this paper, methods for estimating FR are presented and analyzed. The first unambiguous detection of FR in SAR data is presented. A set of real data examples indicates the quality and sensitivity of FR estimation from PALSAR data, allowing the measurement of FR with high precision in areas where such measurements were previously inaccessible. In examples, we present the detection of kilometer-scale ionospheric disturbances, a spatial scale that is not detectable by ground-based GPS measurements. An FR prediction method is presented and validated. Approaches to correct for the estimated FR effects are applied, and their effectiveness is tested on real data.

Assessing Performance of L- and P-Band Polarimetric Interferometric SAR Data in Estimating Boreal Forest Above-Ground Biomass. Biomass estimation performance using polarimetric interferometric synthetic aperture radar (PolInSAR) data is evaluated at L- and P-band frequencies over boreal forest. PolInSAR data are decomposed into ground and volume contributions, retrieving vertical forest structure and polarimetric layer characteristics. The sensitivity of biomass to the obtained parameters is analyzed, and a set of these p...

Multi-Subaperture PGA for SAR Autofocusing For spotlight mode synthetic aperture radar (SAR) autofocusing, the traditional full-aperture phase gradient autofocus (PGA) algorithm might suffer from performance degradation in the presence of significant high-order phase error and residual range cell migration (RCM), which tend to occur when the coherent processing interval (CPI) is long. Meanwhile, PGA does not perform satisfactorily when applied directly on the stripmap data. To address these shortcomings, we present a multi-subaperture PGA algorithm, which takes advantage of the map drift (MD) technique. It smoothly incorporates the estimation of residual RCM and combines the subaperture phase error (SPE) estimated by PGA in a very precise manner. The methodology and accuracy of PGA-MD are investigated in detail. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of PGA-MD in both the spotlight and the stripmap modes.

A Semi-Open Loop GNSS Carrier Tracking Algorithm for Monitoring Strong Equatorial Scintillation. Strong equatorial ionospheric scintillation of radio signals is often associated with simultaneous deep amplitude fading and rapid random carrier phase fluctuations. It poses a challenge for satellite navigation receiver carrier phase tracking loop operation. This paper presents a semi-open loop algorithm that utilizes the known position of a stationary receiver and satellite orbit information to ...

Measurement of the Ionospheric Scintillation Parameter $C_{k}L$ From SAR Images of Clutter. Space-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can be affected by the ionosphere, particularly at L-band and below. A technique is described that exploits the reduction in SAR image contrast to measure the strength of ionospheric turbulence parameter CkL. The theory describing the effect of the ionosphere on the SAR point spread function (PSF) and the consequent effect on clutter is reviewed and exten...

Probabilistic encryption A new probabilistic model of data encryption is introduced. For this model, under suitable complexity assumptions, it is proved that extracting any information about the cleartext from the cyphertext is hard on the average for an adversary with polynomially bounded computational resources. The proof holds for any message space with any probability distribution. The first implementation of this model is presented. The security of this implementation is proved under the interactability assumptin of deciding Quadratic Residuosity modulo composite numbers whose factorization is unknown.

A powerful and efficient algorithm for numerical function optimization: artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm Swarm intelligence is a research branch that models the population of interacting agents or swarms that are able to self-organize. An ant colony, a flock of birds or an immune system is a typical example of a swarm system. Bees' swarming around their hive is another example of swarm intelligence. Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) Algorithm is an optimization algorithm based on the intelligent behaviour of honey bee swarm. In this work, ABC algorithm is used for optimizing multivariable functions and the results produced by ABC, Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Algorithm (PSO) and Particle Swarm Inspired Evolutionary Algorithm (PS-EA) have been compared. The results showed that ABC outperforms the other algorithms.

Toward Massive Machine Type Communications in Ultra-Dense Cellular IoT Networks: Current Issues and Machine Learning-Assisted Solutions The ever-increasing number of resource-constrained machine-type communication (MTC) devices is leading to the critical challenge of fulfilling diverse communication requirements in dynamic and ultra-dense wireless environments. Among different application scenarios that the upcoming 5G and beyond cellular networks are expected to support, such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine type communications (mMTCs), and ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLCs), the mMTC brings the unique technical challenge of supporting a huge number of MTC devices in cellular networks, which is the main focus of this paper. The related challenges include quality of service (QoS) provisioning, handling highly dynamic and sporadic MTC traffic, huge signalling overhead, and radio access network (RAN) congestion. In this regard, this paper aims to identify and analyze the involved technical issues, to review recent advances, to highlight potential solutions and to propose new research directions. First, starting with an overview of mMTC features and QoS provisioning issues, we present the key enablers for mMTC in cellular networks. Along with the highlights on the inefficiency of the legacy random access (RA) procedure in the mMTC scenario, we then present the key features and channel access mechanisms in the emerging cellular IoT standards, namely, LTE-M and narrowband IoT (NB-IoT). Subsequently, we present a framework for the performance analysis of transmission scheduling with the QoS support along with the issues involved in short data packet transmission. Next, we provide a detailed overview of the existing and emerging solutions toward addressing RAN congestion problem, and then identify potential advantages, challenges, and use cases for the applications of emerging machine learning (ML) techniques in ultra-dense cellular networks. Out of several ML techniques, we focus on the application of low-complexity <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -learning approach in the mMTC scenario along with the recent advances toward enhancing its learning performance and convergence. Finally, we discuss some open research challenges and promising future research directions.

Priced Oblivious Transfer: How to Sell Digital Goods We consider the question of protecting the privacy of customers buying digital goods. More specifically, our goal is to allow a buyer to purchase digital goods from a vendor without letting the vendor learn what, and to the extent possible also when and how much, it is buying. We propose solutions which allow the buyer, after making an initial deposit, to engage in an unlimited number of priced oblivious-transfer protocols, satisfying the following requirements: As long as the buyer's balance contains sufficient funds, it will successfully retrieve the selected item and its balance will be debited by the item's price. However, the buyer should be unable to retrieve an item whose cost exceeds its remaining balance. The vendor should learn nothing except what must inevitably be learned, namely, the amount of interaction and the initial deposit amount (which imply upper bounds on the quantity and total price of all information obtained by the buyer). In particular, the vendor should be unable to learn what the buyer's current balance is or when it actually runs out of its funds. The technical tools we develop, in the process of solving this problem, seem to be of independent interest. In particular, we present the first one-round (two-pass) protocol for oblivious transfer that does not rely on the random oracle model (a very similar protocol was independently proposed by Naor and Pinkas [21]). This protocol is a special case of a more general "conditional disclosure" methodology, which extends a previous approach from [11] and adapts it to the 2-party setting.

Cognitive Cars: A New Frontier for ADAS Research This paper provides a survey of recent works on cognitive cars with a focus on driver-oriented intelligent vehicle motion control. The main objective here is to clarify the goals and guidelines for future development in the area of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADASs). Two major research directions are investigated and discussed in detail: 1) stimuli–decisions–actions, which focuses on the driver side, and 2) perception enhancement–action-suggestion–function-delegation, which emphasizes the ADAS side. This paper addresses the important achievements and major difficulties of each direction and discusses how to combine the two directions into a single integrated system to obtain safety and comfort while driving. Other related topics, including driver training and infrastructure design, are also studied.

Wireless Networks with RF Energy Harvesting: A Contemporary Survey Radio frequency (RF) energy transfer and harvesting techniques have recently become alternative methods to power the next generation wireless networks. As this emerging technology enables proactive energy replenishment of wireless devices, it is advantageous in supporting applications with quality of service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, we present a comprehensive literature review on the research progresses in wireless networks with RF energy harvesting capability, referred to as RF energy harvesting networks (RF-EHNs). First, we present an overview of the RF-EHNs including system architecture, RF energy harvesting techniques and existing applications. Then, we present the background in circuit design as well as the state-of-the-art circuitry implementations, and review the communication protocols specially designed for RF-EHNs. We also explore various key design issues in the development of RFEHNs according to the network types, i.e., single-hop networks, multi-antenna networks, relay networks, and cognitive radio networks. Finally, we envision some open research directions.

A multi-objective and PSO based energy efficient path design for mobile sink in wireless sensor networks. Data collection through mobile sink (MS) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is an effective solution to the hot-spot or sink-hole problem caused by multi-hop routing using the static sink. Rendezvous point (RP) based MS path design is a common and popular technique used in this regard. However, design of the optimal path is a well-known NP-hard problem. Therefore, an evolutionary approach like multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) can prove to be a very promising and reasonable approach to solve the same. In this paper, we first present a Linear Programming formulation for the stated problem and then, propose an MOPSO-based algorithm to design an energy efficient trajectory for the MS. The algorithm is presented with an efficient particle encoding scheme and derivation of a proficient multi-objective fitness function. We use Pareto dominance in MOPSO for obtaining both local and global best guides for each particle. We carry out rigorous simulation experiments on the proposed algorithm and compare the results with two existing algorithms namely, tree cluster based data gathering algorithm (TCBDGA) and energy aware sink relocation (EASR). The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs better than both of them in terms of various performance metrics. The results are also validated through the statistical test, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and its least significant difference (LSD) post hoc analysis.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Prescribed Performance for Bipartite Tracking Control of Nonlinear Multiagent Systems With Hysteresis Input Uncertainties. This paper studies bipartite tracking problem of nonlinear multiagent systems over signed directed graphs. Each following agent is modeled by a higher-order nonlinear system in strict-feedback form with unknown dynamics and hysteresis input uncertainty. Both distributed state feedback and output feedback control laws are proposed to achieve bipartite tracking confined by the prescribed performance bounds. The proposed approximation-free distributed controllers only utilize error variables incorporating with performance bound functions, which lead to a low-complexity control algorithm. Moreover, the proposed control laws guarantee that all signals of the closed-loop system are uniformly ultimately bounded.

Fuzzy Adaptive Tracking Control of Wheeled Mobile Robots With State-Dependent Kinematic and Dynamic Disturbances Unlike most works based on pure nonholonomic constraint, this paper proposes a fuzzy adaptive tracking control method for wheeled mobile robots, where unknown slippage occurs and violates the nonholononomic constraint in the form of state-dependent kinematic and dynamic disturbances. These disturbances degrade tracking performance significantly and, therefore, should be compensated. To this end, the kinematics with state-dependent disturbances are rigorously derived based on the general form of slippage in the mobile robots, and fuzzy adaptive observers together with parameter adaptation laws are designed to estimate the state-dependent disturbances in both kinematics and dynamics. Because of the modular structure of the proposed method, it can be easily combined with the previous controllers based on the model with the pure nonholonomic constraint, such that the combination of the fuzzy adaptive observers with the previously proposed backstepping-like feedback linearization controller can guarantee the trajectory tracking errors to be globally ultimately bounded, even when the nonholonomic constraint is violated, and their ultimate bounds can be adjusted appropriately for various types of trajectories in the presence of large initial tracking errors and disturbances. Both the stability analysis and simulation results are provided to validate the proposed controller.

Leader-following consensus in second-order multi-agent systems with input time delay: An event-triggered sampling approach. This paper analytically investigates an event-triggered leader-following consensus in second-order multi-agent systems with time delay in the control input. Each agent׳s update of control input is driven by properly defined event, which depends on the measurement error, the states of its neighboring agents at their individual time instants, and an exponential decay function. Necessary and sufficient conditions are presented to ensure a leader-following consensus. Moreover, the control is updated only when the event-triggered condition is satisfied, which significantly decreases the number of communication among nodes, avoided effectively the continuous communication of the information channel among agents and excluded the Zeno-behavior of triggering time sequences. A numerical simulation example is given to illustrate the theoretical results.

Adaptive neural control for a class of stochastic nonlinear systems by backstepping approach. This paper addresses adaptive neural control for a class of stochastic nonlinear systems which are not in strict-feedback form. Based on the structural characteristics of radial basis function (RBF) neural networks (NNs), a backstepping design approach is extended from stochastic strict-feedback systems to a class of more general stochastic nonlinear systems. In the control design procedure, RBF NNs are used to approximate unknown nonlinear functions and the backstepping technique is utilized to construct the desired controller. The proposed adaptive neural controller guarantees that all the closed-loop signals are bounded and the tracking error converges to a sufficiently small neighborhood of the origin. Two simulation examples are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Prescribed Performance Adaptive Fuzzy Containment Control for Nonlinear Multiagent Systems Using Disturbance Observer This article focuses on the containment control problem for nonlinear multiagent systems (MASs) with unknown disturbance and prescribed performance in the presence of dead-zone output. The fuzzy-logic systems (FLSs) are used to approximate the unknown nonlinear function, and a nonlinear disturbance observer is used to estimate unknown external disturbances. Meanwhile, a new distributed containment control scheme is developed by utilizing the adaptive compensation technique without assumption of the boundary value of unknown disturbance. Furthermore, a Nussbaum function is utilized to cope with the unknown control coefficient, which is caused by the nonlinearity in the output mechanism. Moreover, a second-order tracking differentiator (TD) is introduced to avoid the repeated differentiation of the virtual controller. The outputs of the followers converge to the convex hull spanned by the multiple dynamic leaders. It is shown that all the signals are semiglobally uniformly ultimately bounded (SGUUB), and the local neighborhood containment errors can converge into the prescribed boundary. Finally, the effectiveness of the approach proposed in this article is illustrated by simulation results.

Adaptive Event-Triggered Control of Uncertain Nonlinear Systems Using Intermittent Output Only Although rich collection of research results on event-triggered control exist, no effort has ever been made in integrating state/output triggering and controller triggering simultaneously with backstepping control design. The primary objective of this article is, by using intermittent output signal only, to build a backstepping adaptive event-triggered feedback control for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems. To do so, we need to tackle three technical obstacles. First, the nature of the event triggering makes the transmitted output signal discontinuous, rendering the regular recursive backstepping design method inapplicable as the repetitive differentiation of virtual control signals is literally undefined. Second, the effects arisen from the event-triggering action must be properly accommodated, but the current compensating method only works for systems in normal form, thus a new method needs to be developed in order to handle nonnormal form systems. Third, as only intermittent output signal is available, and at the same time, the impacts of certain terms containing unknown parameters (arising from event triggering) need to be compensated, it is rather challenging to design a suitable state observer. To circumvent these difficulties, we employ the dynamic filtering technique to avoid the differentiation of virtual control signals in the backstepping design, construct a new compensation scheme to deal with the effects of output triggering, and build a new form of state observer to facilitate the development of output feedback control. It is shown that, with the derived adaptive backstepping output-triggered control, all the closed-loop signals are ensured bounded and the transient system performance in the mean square error sense can be adjusted by appropriately adjusting design parameters. The benefits and effectiveness of the proposed scheme are also validated by numerical simulation.

Finite-Time-Prescribed Performance-Based Adaptive Fuzzy Control for Strict-Feedback Nonlinear Systems With Dynamic Uncertainty and Actuator Faults In this article, finite-time-prescribed performance-based adaptive fuzzy control is considered for a class of strict-feedback systems in the presence of actuator faults and dynamic disturbances. To deal with the difficulties associated with the actuator faults and external disturbance, an adaptive fuzzy fault-tolerant control strategy is introduced. Different from the existing controller design methods, a modified performance function, which is called the finite-time performance function (FTPF), is presented. It is proved that the presented controller can ensure all the signals of the closed-loop system are bounded and the tracking error converges to a predetermined region in finite time. The effectiveness of the presented control scheme is verified through the simulation results.

New Stability Conditions Based on Piecewise Fuzzy Lyapunov Functions and Tensor Product Transformations Improvements of recent stability conditions for continuous-time Takagi–Sugeno (T–S) fuzzy systems are proposed. The key idea is to bring together the so-called local transformations of membership functions and new piecewise fuzzy Lyapunov functions. By relying on these special local transformations, the associated linear matrix inequalities that are used to prove the system’s stability can be relaxed without increasing the number of conditions. In addition, to enhance the usefulness of the proposed methodology, one can choose between two different sets of conditions characterized by independence or dependence on known bounds of the membership functions time derivatives. A standard example is presented to illustrate that the proposed method is able to provide substantial improvements in some cases.

Adaptive dynamic programming for finite-horizon optimal control of discrete-time nonlinear systems with ε-error bound. In this paper, we study the finite-horizon optimal control problem for discrete-time nonlinear systems using the adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) approach. The idea is to use an iterative ADP algorithm to obtain the optimal control law which makes the performance index function close to the greatest lower bound of all performance indices within an ε-error bound. The optimal number of control steps can also be obtained by the proposed ADP algorithms. A convergence analysis of the proposed ADP algorithms in terms of performance index function and control policy is made. In order to facilitate the implementation of the iterative ADP algorithms, neural networks are used for approximating the performance index function, computing the optimal control policy, and modeling the nonlinear system. Finally, two simulation examples are employed to illustrate the applicability of the proposed method.

Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults The problem addressed here concerns a set of isolated processors, some unknown subset of which may be faulty, that communicate only by means of two-party messages. Each nonfaulty processor has a private value of information that must be communicated to each other nonfaulty processor. Nonfaulty processors always communicate honestly, whereas faulty processors may lie. The problem is to devise an algorithm in which processors communicate their own values and relay values received from others that allows each nonfaulty processor to infer a value for each other processor. The value inferred for a nonfaulty processor must be that processor's private value, and the value inferred for a faulty one must be consistent with the corresponding value inferred by each other nonfaulty processor.It is shown that the problem is solvable for, and only for, n ≥ 3m + 1, where m is the number of faulty processors and n is the total number. It is also shown that if faulty processors can refuse to pass on information but cannot falsely relay information, the problem is solvable for arbitrary n ≥ m ≥ 0. This weaker assumption can be approximated in practice using cryptographic methods.

CellSense: A Probabilistic RSSI-Based GSM Positioning System Context-aware applications have been gaining huge interest in the last few years. With cell phones becoming ubiquitous computing devices, cell phone localization has become an important research problem. In this paper, we present CellSense, a probabilistic RSSI-based fingerprinting location determination system for GSM phones. We discuss the challenges of implementing a probabilistic fingerprinting localization technique in GSM networks and present the details of the CellSense system and how it addresses the challenges. To evaluate our proposed system, we implemented CellSense on Android-based phones. Results for two different testbeds, representing urban and rural environments, show that CellSense provides at least 23.8% enhancement in accuracy in rural areas and at least 86.4% in urban areas compared to other RSSI-based GSM localization systems. This comes with a minimal increase in computational requirements. We also evaluate the effect of changing the different system parameters on the accuracy-complexity tradeoff.

Robust Median Filtering Forensics Using an Autoregressive Model In order to verify the authenticity of digital images, researchers have begun developing digital forensic techniques to identify image editing. One editing operation that has recently received increased attention is median filtering. While several median filtering detection techniques have recently been developed, their performance is degraded by JPEG compression. These techniques suffer similar degradations in performance when a small window of the image is analyzed, as is done in localized filtering or cut-and-paste detection, rather than the image as a whole. In this paper, we propose a new, robust median filtering forensic technique. It operates by analyzing the statistical properties of the median filter residual (MFR), which we define as the difference between an image in question and a median filtered version of itself. To capture the statistical properties of the MFR, we fit it to an autoregressive (AR) model. We then use the AR coefficients as features for median filter detection. We test the effectiveness of our proposed median filter detection techniques through a series of experiments. These results show that our proposed forensic technique can achieve important performance gains over existing methods, particularly at low false-positive rates, with a very small dimension of features.

SmartVeh: Secure and Efficient Message Access Control and Authentication for Vehicular Cloud Computing. With the growing number of vehicles and popularity of various services in vehicular cloud computing (VCC), message exchanging among vehicles under traffic conditions and in emergency situations is one of the most pressing demands, and has attracted significant attention. However, it is an important challenge to authenticate the legitimate sources of broadcast messages and achieve fine-grained message access control. In this work, we propose SmartVeh, a secure and efficient message access control and authentication scheme in VCC. A hierarchical, attribute-based encryption technique is utilized to achieve fine-grained and flexible message sharing, which ensures that vehicles whose persistent or dynamic attributes satisfy the access policies can access the broadcast message with equipped on-board units (OBUs). Message authentication is enforced by integrating an attribute-based signature, which achieves message authentication and maintains the anonymity of the vehicles. In order to reduce the computations of the OBUs in the vehicles, we outsource the heavy computations of encryption, decryption and signing to a cloud server and road-side units. The theoretical analysis and simulation results reveal that our secure and efficient scheme is suitable for VCC.

Energy harvesting algorithm considering max flow problem in wireless sensor networks. In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), sensor nodes with poor energy always have bad effect on the data rate or max flow. These nodes are called bottleneck nodes. In this paper, in order to increase the max flow, we assume an energy harvesting WSNs environment to investigate the cooperation of multiple Mobile Chargers (MCs). MCs are mobile robots that use wireless charging technology to charge sensor nodes in WSNs. This means that in energy harvesting WSNs environments, sensor nodes can obtain energy replenishment by using MCs or collecting energy from nature by themselves. In our research, we use MCs to improve the energy of the sensor nodes by performing multiple rounds of unified scheduling, and finally achieve the purpose of increasing the max flow at sinks. Firstly, we model this problem as a Linear Programming (LP) to search the max flow in a round of charging scheduling and prove that the problem is NP-hard. In order to solve the problem, we propose a heuristic approach: deploying MCs in units of paths with the lowest energy node priority. To reduce the energy consumption of MCs and increase the charging efficiency, we also take the optimization of MCs’ moving distance into our consideration. Finally, we extend the method to multiple rounds of scheduling called BottleNeck. Simulation results show that Bottleneck performs well at increasing max flow.

MMSE-Optimal Sequential Processing for Cell-Free Massive MIMO With Radio Stripes Cell-free massive multiple-input-multiple-output (mMIMO) is an emerging technology for beyond 5G with its promising features such as higher spectral efficiency and superior spatial diversity as compared to conventional multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) technology. The main working principle of cell-free mMIMO is that many distributed access points (APs) cooperate simultaneously to serve all th...

Joint Optimization of Cooperative Beamforming and Relay Assignment in Multi-User Wireless Relay Networks This paper considers joint optimization of cooperative beamforming and relay assignment for multi-user multi-relay wireless networks to maximize the minimum of the received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios (SINR). Separated continuous optimization of beamforming and binary optimization of relay assignment already pose very challenging programs. Certainly, their joint optimization, which involves nonconvex objectives and coupled constraints in continuous and binary variables, is among the most challenging optimization problems. Even the conventional relaxation of binary constraints by continuous box constraints is still computationally intractable because the relaxed program is still highly nonconvex. However, it is shown in this paper that the joint programs fit well in the d.c. (difference of two convex functions/sets) optimization framework. Efficient optimization algorithms are then developed for both cases of orthogonal and nonorthogonal transmission by multiple users. Simulation results show that the jointly optimized beamforming and relay assignment not only save transmission bandwidth but can also maintain well the network SINRs.

Joint Optimization of Source Precoding and Relay Beamforming in Wireless MIMO Relay Networks. This paper considers joint linear processing at multi-antenna sources and one multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay station for both one-way and two-way relay-assisted wireless communications. The one-way relaying is applicable in the scenario of downlink transmission by a multi-antenna base station to multiple single-antenna users with the help of one MIMO relay. In such a scenario, the objective of join linear processing is to maximize the information throughput to users. The design problem is equivalently formulated as the maximization of the worst signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) among all users subject to various transmission power constraints. Such a program of nonconvex objective minimization under nonconvex constraints is transformed to a canonical d.c. (difference of convex functions/sets) program of d.c. function optimization under convex constraints through nonconvex duality with zero duality gap. An efficient iterative algorithm is then applied to solve this canonical d.c program. For the scenario of using one MIMO relay to assist two sources exchanging their information in two-way relying manner, the joint linear processing aims at either minimizing the maximum mean square error (MSE) or maximizing the total information throughput of the two sources. By applying tractable optimization for the linear minimum MSE estimator and d.c. programming, an iterative algorithm is developed to solve these two optimization problems. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed methods substantially outperform previously-known joint optimization methods.

Joint Load Balancing and Interference Management for Small-Cell Heterogeneous Networks With Limited Backhaul Capacity In this paper, new strategies are devised for joint load balancing and interference management in the downlink of a heterogeneous network, where small cells are densely deployed within the coverage area of a traditional macrocell. Unlike existing work, the limited backhaul capacity at each base station (BS) is taken into account. Here, users (UEs) cannot be offloaded to any arbitrary BS, but only to ones with sufficient backhaul capacity remaining. Jointly designed with traffic offload, transmit power allocation mitigates the intercell interference to further support the quality of service of each UE. The objective here is either: 1) to maximize the network sum rate subject to minimum throughput requirements at individual UEs, or 2) to maximize the minimum UE throughput. Both formulated problems belong to the difficult class of mixed-integer nonconvex optimization problems. The inherently binary BS-UE association variables are strongly coupled with the transmit power variables, making the problems even more challenging to solve. New iterative algorithms are developed based on an exact penalty method combined with successive convex programming, where the binary BS-UE association problem and the nonconvex power allocation problem are dealt with one at a time. At each iteration of the proposed algorithms, only two simple convex problems need to be solved at the same time scale. It is proven that the algorithms improve the objective functions at each iteration and converge eventually. Numerical results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms in both traffic offloading and interference mitigation.

Federated Learning for Vehicular Internet of Things: Recent Advances and Open Issues Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning approach that can achieve the purpose of collaborative learning from a large amount of data that belong to different parties without sharing the raw data among the data owners. FL can sufficiently utilize the computing capabilities of multiple learning agents to improve the learning efficiency while providing a better privacy solution for the data owners. FL attracts tremendous interests from a large number of industries due to growing privacy concerns. Future vehicular Internet of Things (IoT) systems, such as cooperative autonomous driving and intelligent transport systems (ITS), feature a large number of devices and privacy-sensitive data where the communication, computing, and storage resources must be efficiently utilized. FL could be a promising approach to solve these existing challenges. In this paper, we first conduct a brief survey of existing studies on FL and its use in wireless IoT. Then, we discuss the significance and technical challenges of applying FL in vehicular IoT, and point out future research directions.

A Secure Federated Learning Framework for 5G Networks Federated learning (FL) has recently been proposed as an emerging paradigm to build machine learning models using distributed training datasets that are locally stored and maintained on different devices in 5G networks while providing privacy preservation for participants. In FL, the central aggregator accumulates local updates uploaded by participants to update a global model. However, there are two critical security threats: poisoning and membership inference attacks. These attacks may be carried out by malicious or unreliable participants, resulting in the construction failure of global models or privacy leakage of FL models. Therefore, it is crucial for FL to develop security means of defense. In this article, we propose a blockchain-based secure FL framework to create smart contracts and prevent malicious or unreliable participants from being involved in FL. In doing so, the central aggregator recognizes malicious and unreliable participants by automatically executing smart contracts to defend against poisoning attacks. Further, we use local differential privacy techniques to prevent membership inference attacks. Numerical results suggest that the proposed framework can effectively deter poisoning and membership inference attacks, thereby improving the security of FL in 5G networks.

Energy Efficient Federated Learning Over Wireless Communication Networks In this paper, the problem of energy efficient transmission and computation resource allocation for federated learning (FL) over wireless communication networks is investigated. In the considered model, each user exploits limited local computational resources to train a local FL model with its collected data and, then, sends the trained FL model to a base station (BS) which aggregates the local FL model and broadcasts it back to all of the users. Since FL involves an exchange of a learning model between users and the BS, both computation and communication latencies are determined by the learning accuracy level. Meanwhile, due to the limited energy budget of the wireless users, both local computation energy and transmission energy must be considered during the FL process. This joint learning and communication problem is formulated as an optimization problem whose goal is to minimize the total energy consumption of the system under a latency constraint. To solve this problem, an iterative algorithm is proposed where, at every step, closed-form solutions for time allocation, bandwidth allocation, power control, computation frequency, and learning accuracy are derived. Since the iterative algorithm requires an initial feasible solution, we construct the completion time minimization problem and a bisection-based algorithm is proposed to obtain the optimal solution, which is a feasible solution to the original energy minimization problem. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithms can reduce up to 59.5% energy consumption compared to the conventional FL method.

On the ratio of optimal integral and fractional covers It is shown that the ratio of optimal integral and fractional covers of a hypergraph does not exceed 1 + log d , where d is the maximum degree. This theorem may replace probabilistic methods in certain circumstances. Several applications are shown.

Mobile Edge Computing: A Survey. Mobile edge computing (MEC) is an emergent architecture where cloud computing services are extended to the edge of networks leveraging mobile base stations. As a promising edge technology, it can be applied to mobile, wireless, and wireline scenarios, using software and hardware platforms, located at the network edge in the vicinity of end-users. MEC provides seamless integration of multiple appli...

On signatures of knowledge In a traditional signature scheme, a signature σ on a message m is issued under a public key PK, and can be interpreted as follows: “The owner of the public key PK and its corresponding secret key has signed message m.” In this paper we consider schemes that allow one to issue signatures on behalf of any NP statement, that can be interpreted as follows: “A person in possession of a witness w to the statement that x ∈L has signed message m.” We refer to such schemes as signatures of knowledge. We formally define the notion of a signature of knowledge. We begin by extending the traditional definition of digital signature schemes, captured by Canetti's ideal signing functionality, to the case of signatures of knowledge. We then give an alternative definition in terms of games that also seems to capture the necessary properties one may expect from a signature of knowledge. We then gain additional confidence in our two definitions by proving them equivalent. We construct signatures of knowledge under standard complexity assumptions in the common-random-string model. We then extend our definition to allow signatures of knowledge to be nested i.e., a signature of knowledge (or another accepting input to a UC-realizable ideal functionality) can itself serve as a witness for another signature of knowledge. Thus, as a corollary, we obtain the first delegatable anonymous credential system, i.e., a system in which one can use one's anonymous credentials as a secret key for issuing anonymous credentials to others.

An evaluation of direct attacks using fake fingers generated from ISO templates This work reports a vulnerability evaluation of a highly competitive ISO matcher to direct attacks carried out with fake fingers generated from ISO templates. Experiments are carried out on a fingerprint database acquired in a real-life scenario and show that the evaluated system is highly vulnerable to the proposed attack scheme, granting access in over 75% of the attempts (for a high-security operating point). Thus, the study disproves the popular belief of minutiae templates non-reversibility and raises a key vulnerability issue in the use of non-encrypted standard templates. (This article is an extended version of Galbally et al., 2008, which was awarded with the IBM Best Student Paper Award in the track of Biometrics at ICPR 2008).

Placing Virtual Machines to Optimize Cloud Gaming Experience Optimizing cloud gaming experience is no easy task due to the complex tradeoff between gamer quality of experience (QoE) and provider net profit. We tackle the challenge and study an optimization problem to maximize the cloud gaming provider's total profit while achieving just-good-enough QoE. We conduct measurement studies to derive the QoE and performance models. We formulate and optimally solve the problem. The optimization problem has exponential running time, and we develop an efficient heuristic algorithm. We also present an alternative formulation and algorithms for closed cloud gaming services with dedicated infrastructures, where the profit is not a concern and overall gaming QoE needs to be maximized. We present a prototype system and testbed using off-the-shelf virtualization software, to demonstrate the practicality and efficiency of our algorithms. Our experience on realizing the testbed sheds some lights on how cloud gaming providers may build up their own profitable services. Last, we conduct extensive trace-driven simulations to evaluate our proposed algorithms. The simulation results show that the proposed heuristic algorithms: (i) produce close-to-optimal solutions, (ii) scale to large cloud gaming services with 20,000 servers and 40,000 gamers, and (iii) outperform the state-of-the-art placement heuristic, e.g., by up to 3.5 times in terms of net profits.

Survey of Fog Computing: Fundamental, Network Applications, and Research Challenges. Fog computing is an emerging paradigm that extends computation, communication, and storage facilities toward the edge of a network. Compared to traditional cloud computing, fog computing can support delay-sensitive service requests from end-users (EUs) with reduced energy consumption and low traffic congestion. Basically, fog networks are viewed as offloading to core computation and storage. Fog n...

Social Robots for (Second) Language Learning in (Migrant) Primary School Children Especially these days, innovation and support from technology to relieve pressure in education is highly urgent. This study tested the potential advantage of a social robot over a tablet in (second) language learning on performance, engagement, and enjoyment. Shortages in primary education call for new technology solutions. Previous studies combined robots with tablets, to compensate for robot’s limitations, however, this study applied direct human–robot interaction. Primary school children (N = 63, aged 4–6) participated in a 3-wave field experiment with story-telling exercises, either with a semi-autonomous robot (without tablet, using WOz) or a tablet. Results showed increased learning gains over time when training with a social robot, compared to the tablet. Children who trained with a robot were more engaged in the story-telling task and enjoyed it more. Robot’s behavioral style (social or neutral) hardly differed overall, however, seems to vary for high versus low educational abilities. While social robots need sophistication before being implemented in schools, our study shows the potential of social robots as tutors in (second) language learning.

Kinematic properties of human arm reaching movements in a three-dimensional space In this study, kinematic properties of human arm reaching movements have been analyzed by use of experimental results of arm trajectories observed in a three-dimensional (3D) space. In the beginning, hand paths obtained by the experiments are kinematically analyzed to pursue their linearity, and we successfully specify a plane on which a hand moves. In the next place, the hand speed profile is calculated by use of position data observed by the experiment in a 3D space. Besides, the hand speed profile is also analytically produced under the minimum jerk criterion with respect to the displacement along the hand path. These observed and produced trajectories are compared, and the similarity of two trajectories has been demonstrated. As a result of the analyses for path and the speed profile of a hand, kinematic properties of human arm trajectories have been identified.

Eye-vergence visual servoing enhancing Lyapunov-stable trackability Visual servoing methods for hand---eye configuration are vulnerable for hand's dynamical oscillation, since nonlinear dynamical effects of whole manipulator stand against the stable tracking ability (trackability). Our proposal to solve this problem is that the controller for visual servoing of the hand and the one for eye-vergence should be separated independently based on decoupling each other, where the trackability is verified by Lyapunov analysis. Then the effectiveness of the decoupled hand and eye-vergence visual servoing method is evaluated through simulations incorporated with actual dynamics of 7-DoF robot with additional 3-DoF for eye-vergence mechanism by amplitude and phase frequency analysis.

Real-time Monocular Object SLAM. We present a real-time object-based SLAM system that leverages the largest object database to date. Our approach comprises two main components: (1) a monocular SLAM algorithm that exploits object rigidity constraints to improve the map and find its real scale, and (2) a novel object recognition algorithm based on bags of binary words, which provides live detections with a database of 500 3D objects. The two components work together and benefit each other: the SLAM algorithm accumulates information from the observations of the objects, anchors object features to especial map landmarks and sets constrains on the optimization. At the same time, objects partially or fully located within the map are used as a prior to guide the recognition algorithm, achieving higher recall. We evaluate our proposal on five real environments showing improvements on the accuracy of the map and efficiency with respect to other state-of-the-art techniques.

Service robot system with an informationally structured environment Daily life assistance is one of the most important applications for service robots. For comfortable assistance, service robots must recognize the surrounding conditions correctly, including human motion, the position of objects, and obstacles. However, since the everyday environment is complex and unpredictable, it is almost impossible to sense all of the necessary information using only a robot and sensors attached to it. In order to realize a service robot for daily life assistance, we have been developing an informationally structured environment using distributed sensors embedded in the environment. The present paper introduces a service robot system with an informationally structured environment referred to the ROS-TMS. This system enables the integration of various data from distributed sensors, as well as storage of these data in an on-line database and the planning of the service motion of a robot using real-time information about the surroundings. In addition, we discuss experiments such as detection and fetch-and-give tasks using the developed real environment and robot. Introduction of architecture and components of the ROS-TMS.Integration of various data from distributed sensors for service robot system.Object detection system (ODS) using RGB-D camera.Motion planning for a fetch-and-give task using a wagon and a humanoid robot.Handing over an object to a human using manipulability of both a robot and a human.

A transformable wheel-legged mobile robot: Design, analysis and experiment. This paper proposes a new type of transformable wheel-legged mobile robot that could be applied on both flat and rugged terrains. It integrates stability and maneuverability of wheeled robot and obstacle climbing capability of legged robot by means of a wheel-legged transformable mechanism. These two modes can be switched easily with two spokes touching terrain. In this paper, the motion analysis of the proposed robot under wheeled mode, legged mode and transformable mode are carried out after briefly introducing the concept and control system design. Then, the obstacle climbing strategies under wheeled and legged modes are obtained. Finally, a prototype of the proposed robot is designed and manufactured based upon the simulation analysis. And the experiment results validate the effectiveness of the proposed transformable wheel-legged mobile robot.

Footprints: history-rich tools for information foraging Inspired by Hill and Hollans original work [7], we have beendeveloping a theory of interaction history and building tools toapply this theory to navigation in a complex information space. Wehave built a series of tools - map, paths, annota- tions andsignposts - based on a physical-world navigation metaphor. Thesetools have been in use for over a year. Our user study involved acontrolled browse task and showed that users were able to get thesame amount of work done with significantly less effort.

A Low-Complexity Analytical Modeling for Cross-Layer Adaptive Error Protection in Video Over WLAN We find a low-complicity and accurate model to solve the problem of optimizing MAC-layer transmission of real-time video over wireless local area networks (WLANs) using cross-layer techniques. The objective in this problem is to obtain the optimal MAC retry limit in order to minimize the total packet loss rate. First, the accuracy of Fluid and M/M/1/K analytical models is examined. Then we derive a closed-form expression for service time in WLAN MAC transmission, and will use this in mathematical formulation of our optimization problem based on M/G/1 model. Subsequently we introduce an approximate and simple formula for MAC-layer service time, which leads to the M/M/1 model. Compared with M/G/1, we particularly show that our M/M/1-based model provides a low-complexity and yet quite accurate means for analyzing MAC transmission process in WLAN. Using our M/M/1 model-based analysis, we derive closed-form formulas for the packet overflow drop rate and optimum retry-limit. These closed-form expressions can be effectively invoked for analyzing adaptive retry-limit algorithms. Simulation results (network simulator-2) will verify the accuracy of our analytical models.

Semantic Image Synthesis With Spatially-Adaptive Normalization We propose spatially-adaptive normalization, a simple but effective layer for synthesizing photorealistic images given an input semantic layout. Previous methods directly feed the semantic layout as input to the deep network, which is then processed through stacks of convolution, normalization, and nonlinearity layers. We show that this is suboptimal as the normalization layers tend to "wash away" semantic information. To address the issue, we propose using the input layout. for modulating the activations in normalization layers through a spatially-adaptive,learned transformation. Experiments on several challenging datasets demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method over existing approaches, regarding both visual fidelity and align-ment with input layouts. Finally, our model allows user control over both semantic and style as synthesizing images.

Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults The problem addressed here concerns a set of isolated processors, some unknown subset of which may be faulty, that communicate only by means of two-party messages. Each nonfaulty processor has a private value of information that must be communicated to each other nonfaulty processor. Nonfaulty processors always communicate honestly, whereas faulty processors may lie. The problem is to devise an algorithm in which processors communicate their own values and relay values received from others that allows each nonfaulty processor to infer a value for each other processor. The value inferred for a nonfaulty processor must be that processor's private value, and the value inferred for a faulty one must be consistent with the corresponding value inferred by each other nonfaulty processor.It is shown that the problem is solvable for, and only for, n ≥ 3m + 1, where m is the number of faulty processors and n is the total number. It is also shown that if faulty processors can refuse to pass on information but cannot falsely relay information, the problem is solvable for arbitrary n ≥ m ≥ 0. This weaker assumption can be approximated in practice using cryptographic methods.

Reservoir computing approaches to recurrent neural network training Echo State Networks and Liquid State Machines introduced a new paradigm in artificial recurrent neural network (RNN) training, where an RNN (the reservoir) is generated randomly and only a readout is trained. The paradigm, becoming known as reservoir computing, greatly facilitated the practical application of RNNs and outperformed classical fully trained RNNs in many tasks. It has lately become a vivid research field with numerous extensions of the basic idea, including reservoir adaptation, thus broadening the initial paradigm to using different methods for training the reservoir and the readout. This review systematically surveys both current ways of generating/adapting the reservoirs and training different types of readouts. It offers a natural conceptual classification of the techniques, which transcends boundaries of the current “brand-names” of reservoir methods, and thus aims to help in unifying the field and providing the reader with a detailed “map” of it.

Implementing Vehicle Routing Algorithms

Switching Stabilization for a Class of Slowly Switched Systems In this technical note, the problem of switching stabilization for slowly switched linear systems is investigated. In particular, the considered systems can be composed of all unstable subsystems. Based on the invariant subspace theory, the switching signal with mode-dependent average dwell time (MDADT) property is designed to exponentially stabilize the underlying system. Furthermore, sufficient condition of stabilization for switched systems with all stable subsystems under MDADT switching is also given. The correctness and effectiveness of the proposed approaches are illustrated by a numerical example.

Quaternion polar harmonic Fourier moments for color images. •Quaternion polar harmonic Fourier moments (QPHFM) is proposed.•Complex Chebyshev-Fourier moments (CHFM) is extended to quaternion QCHFM.•Comparison experiments between QPHFM and QZM, QPZM, QOFMM, QCHFM and QRHFM are conducted.•QPHFM performs superbly in image reconstruction and invariant object recognition.•The importance of phase information of QPHFM in image reconstruction are discussed.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

The (Fe)Male Robot: How Robot Body Shape Impacts First Impressions And Trust Towards Robots Humanlikeness, including robot gender, impacts people's impression of social robots (Eyssel and Hegel in J Appl Soc Psychol 42(9):2213-2230, 2012) and actual human robot interaction (HRI) (Kuchenbrandt et al. in Int J Soc Robot 6(3):417-427, 2014; Reich-Stiebert and Eyssel in Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE international conference on human-robot interaction, ACM, pp 166-176, 2017). Although robot gender has been manipulated in various ways in previous research (Alexander et al. in Proceedings of the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, vol 36, 2014; Eyssel and Hegel, 2012), robot body shape as a gender cue has been neglected in this context. Therefore, the current research investigated the effects of manipulating a robot torso's waist-to-hip ratio and shoulder width on social judgments of a robot. As hypothesized, a robot with a female body shape was perceived as more communal, it was preferred for stereotypically female tasks, and evoked more cognitive and affective trust than a robot with a male body shape. Unexpectedly, both robot types were perceived as equally agentic and they were deemed equally suitable for stereotypically male tasks. Above and beyond, participants' motivation to respond in a socially desirable manner, their societal beliefs about agentic and communal traits considered appropriate for men and women, sexist attitudes, gender, and technology commitment affected their impression formation about robots. We point to the risks of designing gendered robots and recommend to manipulate robot gender deliberately with regard to the effects this might have on HRI.

Effects of visual appearance on the attribution of applications in social robotics This paper investigates the influence of visual appearance of social robots on judgments about their potential applications. 183 participants rated the appropriateness of thirteen categories of applications for twelve social robots in an online study. The ratings were based on videos displaying the appearance of the robot combined with basic information about the robots' general functions. The results confirmed the hypothesis that the visual appearance of robots is a significant predictor for the estimation of applications in the eye of the beholder. Furthermore, the ratings showed an attractiveness bias: robots being judged as more attractive by the users also received more positive evaluations (i.e., ldquolikingrdquo).

Social Acceptance of Robots in Different Occupational Fields: A Systematic Literature Review. Robots today are working in both industrial and service sectors. Robots have evolved from one-function automatons to intelligent systems of versatile features, and the new generation of service robots are sharing same space and tasks with humans. The aim of this systematic literature review was to examine how the social acceptance of robots in different occupational fields has been studied and what kinds of attitudes the studies have discovered regarding robots as workers. The data were collected in October 2016 from four major bibliographic databases. Preliminary search results included 336 research articles from which 42 were selected to the final research through inclusion criteria. Of the studies, 69% concerned robots working in health and social services. Positive attitudes occurred more frequently in studies exposing participants to robots. Robots were considered appropriate for different work tasks. Telepresence robots were highly approved by health care staff. The criticism was directed to decreasing human contact and unnecessary deployment of new technology. Our results imply that attitudes toward robots are positive in many fields of work. Yet there is a need for validated measures and nationally representative data that would help us to further our understanding of social acceptance of robots in work.

What'S In A Name? An Online Survey On Gender Stereotyping Of Humanoid Social Robots This study investigated whether humanoid social robots are implicitly assigned a gender, which then influences evaluations and acceptance of the devices. To assess stereotyping, a naming task was used. Pictures of robots were presented in a mock marketing survey, and the participants were asked to provide a name for the device and rate them on a number of characteristics and select potential tasks for them. Forty participants filled out the web-based survey. The results showed overwhelming preferences for male names, which were more pronounced for older participants and for those with a more feminine self-image. Robots that were rated higher on agency and lower on communion attributes were more likely to be assigned technical tasks, and they were less likely to be accepted into participants' personal lives. Thus, technological artefacts are subject to stereotyping. These findings are discussed within the framework of feminist technoscience.

A Toy Or A Friend? Children'S Anthropomorphic Beliefs About Robots And How These Relate To Second-Language Word Learning This study investigates the degree to which children anthropomorphize a robot tutor and whether this anthropomorphism relates to their vocabulary learning in a second-language (L2) tutoring intervention. With this aim, an anthropomorphism questionnaire was administered to 5-year-old children (N= 104) twice: prior to and following a seven-session L2 vocabulary training with a humanoid robot. On average, children tended to anthropomorphize the robot prior to and after the lessons to a similar degree, but many children changed their attributed anthropomorphic features. Boys anthropomorphized the robot less after the lessons than girls. Moreover, there was a weak but significant positive correlation between anthropomorphism as measured before the lessons and scores on a word-knowledge post-test administered the day after the last lesson. There was also a weak but significant positive correlation between the change in anthropomorphism over time and scores on a word-knowledge post-test administered approximately 2 weeks after the last lesson. Our results underscore the need to manage children's expectations in robot-assisted education. Also, future research could explore adaptations to individual children's expectations in child-robot interactions.

Computational thinking Summary form only given. My vision for the 21st century, Computational Thinking, will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

JPEG Error Analysis and Its Applications to Digital Image Forensics JPEG is one of the most extensively used image formats. Understanding the inherent characteristics of JPEG may play a useful role in digital image forensics. In this paper, we introduce JPEG error analysis to the study of image forensics. The main errors of JPEG include quantization, rounding, and truncation errors. Through theoretically analyzing the effects of these errors on single and double JPEG compression, we have developed three novel schemes for image forensics including identifying whether a bitmap image has previously been JPEG compressed, estimating the quantization steps of a JPEG image, and detecting the quantization table of a JPEG image. Extensive experimental results show that our new methods significantly outperform existing techniques especially for the images of small sizes. We also show that the new method can reliably detect JPEG image blocks which are as small as 8 × 8 pixels and compressed with quality factors as high as 98. This performance is important for analyzing and locating small tampered regions within a composite image.

Highly dynamic Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector routing (DSDV) for mobile computers An ad-hoc network is the cooperative engagement of a collection of Mobile Hosts without the required intervention of any centralized Access Point. In this paper we present an innovative design for the operation of such ad-hoc networks. The basic idea of the design is to operate each Mobile Host as a specialized router, which periodically advertises its view of the interconnection topology with other Mobile Hosts within the network. This amounts to a new sort of routing protocol. We have investigated modifications to the basic Bellman-Ford routing mechanisms, as specified by RIP [5], to make it suitable for a dynamic and self-starting network mechanism as is required by users wishing to utilize ad hoc networks. Our modifications address some of the previous objections to the use of Bellman-Ford, related to the poor looping properties of such algorithms in the face of broken links and the resulting time dependent nature of the interconnection topology describing the links between the Mobile Hosts. Finally, we describe the ways in which the basic network-layer routing can be modified to provide MAC-layer support for ad-hoc networks.

The FERET Evaluation Methodology for Face-Recognition Algorithms Two of the most critical requirements in support of producing reliable face-recognition systems are a large database of facial images and a testing procedure to evaluate systems. The Face Recognition Technology (FERET) program has addressed both issues through the FERET database of facial images and the establishment of the FERET tests. To date, 14,126 images from 1,199 individuals are included in the FERET database, which is divided into development and sequestered portions of the database. In September 1996, the FERET program administered the third in a series of FERET face-recognition tests. The primary objectives of the third test were to 1) assess the state of the art, 2) identify future areas of research, and 3) measure algorithm performance.

Neural fitted q iteration – first experiences with a data efficient neural reinforcement learning method This paper introduces NFQ, an algorithm for efficient and effective training of a Q-value function represented by a multi-layer perceptron. Based on the principle of storing and reusing transition experiences, a model-free, neural network based Reinforcement Learning algorithm is proposed. The method is evaluated on three benchmark problems. It is shown empirically, that reasonably few interactions with the plant are needed to generate control policies of high quality.

A Web-Based Tool For Control Engineering Teaching In this article a new tool for control engineering teaching is presented. The tool was implemented using Java applets and is freely accessible through Web. It allows the analysis and simulation of linear control systems and was created to complement the theoretical lectures in basic control engineering courses. The article is not only centered in the description of the tool but also in the methodology to use it and its evaluation in an electrical engineering degree. Two practical problems are included in the manuscript to illustrate the use of the main functions implemented. The developed web-based tool can be accessed through the link http://www.controlweb.cyc.ull.es. (C) 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

GROPING: Geomagnetism and cROwdsensing Powered Indoor NaviGation Although a large number of WiFi fingerprinting based indoor localization systems have been proposed, our field experience with Google Maps Indoor (GMI), the only system available for public testing, shows that it is far from mature for indoor navigation. In this paper, we first report our field studies with GMI, as well as experiment results aiming to explain our unsatisfactory GMI experience. Then motivated by the obtained insights, we propose GROPING as a self-contained indoor navigation system independent of any infrastructural support. GROPING relies on geomagnetic fingerprints that are far more stable than WiFi fingerprints, and it exploits crowdsensing to construct floor maps rather than expecting individual venues to supply digitized maps. Based on our experiments with 20 participants in various floors of a big shopping mall, GROPING is able to deliver a sufficient accuracy for localization and thus provides smooth navigation experience.

A multi-objective and PSO based energy efficient path design for mobile sink in wireless sensor networks. Data collection through mobile sink (MS) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is an effective solution to the hot-spot or sink-hole problem caused by multi-hop routing using the static sink. Rendezvous point (RP) based MS path design is a common and popular technique used in this regard. However, design of the optimal path is a well-known NP-hard problem. Therefore, an evolutionary approach like multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) can prove to be a very promising and reasonable approach to solve the same. In this paper, we first present a Linear Programming formulation for the stated problem and then, propose an MOPSO-based algorithm to design an energy efficient trajectory for the MS. The algorithm is presented with an efficient particle encoding scheme and derivation of a proficient multi-objective fitness function. We use Pareto dominance in MOPSO for obtaining both local and global best guides for each particle. We carry out rigorous simulation experiments on the proposed algorithm and compare the results with two existing algorithms namely, tree cluster based data gathering algorithm (TCBDGA) and energy aware sink relocation (EASR). The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs better than both of them in terms of various performance metrics. The results are also validated through the statistical test, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and its least significant difference (LSD) post hoc analysis.

A Hierarchical Architecture Using Biased Min-Consensus for USV Path Planning This paper proposes a hierarchical architecture using the biased min-consensus (BMC) method, to solve the path planning problem of unmanned surface vessel (USV). We take the fixed-point monitoring mission as an example, where a series of intermediate monitoring points should be visited once by USV. The whole framework incorporates the low-level layer planning the standard path between any two intermediate points, and the high-level fashion determining their visiting sequence. First, the optimal standard path in terms of voyage time and risk measure is planned by the BMC protocol, given that the corresponding graph is constructed with node state and edge weight. The USV will avoid obstacles or keep a certain distance safely, and arrive at the target point quickly. It is proven theoretically that the state of the graph will converge to be stable after finite iterations, i.e., the optimal solution can be found by BMC with low calculation complexity. Second, by incorporating the constraint of intermediate points, their visiting sequence is optimized by BMC again with the reconstruction of a new virtual graph based on the former planned results. The extensive simulation results in various scenarios also validate the feasibility and effectiveness of our method for autonomous navigation.

Following others through an information maze: The impact of social navigation on information seeking behavior. “Social Navigation” for the Web has been created in response to the problem of disorientation in an information space. It helps users tackle the information overload challenge by visualizing the traces of behavior of other users and adding social affordances to the information space. Despite the popularity of the concept of social navigation, very few studies of information systems with social navigation can be found in the research literature. In this paper, we report on our study of the impact of social navigation support in the context of task-centered information access. We explore the design of our information access interface which is designed to offer integrated social navigation support, as well as our experiment to systematically assess how social navigation support influenced participants’ information seeking behavior. This experiment will identify situations in which social navigation support is most useful and to investigate the effect of interpersonal trust as an individual factor on the likelihood of following social navigation cues. The results of the study show that social navigation support can successfully guide participants to relevant documents, enabling them to achieve higher search performance. The study also revealed that the effect of social navigation cues on participants’ information seeking behaviors varies under different circumstances, especially under time constraints and for those with high levels of interpersonal trust.

Progressor: social navigation support through open social student modeling The increased volumes of online learning content have produced two problems: how to help students to find the most appropriate resources and how to engage them in using these resources. Personalized and social learning have been suggested as potential ways to address these problems. Our work presented in this paper combines the ideas of personalized and social learning in the context of educational hypermedia. We introduce Progressor, an innovative Web-based tool based on the concepts of social navigation and open student modeling that helps students to find the most relevant resources in a large collection of parameterized self-assessment questions on Java programming. We have evaluated Progressor in a semester-long classroom study, the results of which are presented in this paper. The study confirmed the impact of personalized social navigation support provided by the system in the target context. The interface encouraged students to explore more topics attempting more questions and achieving higher success rates in answering them. A deeper analysis of the social navigation support mechanism revealed that the top students successfully led the way to discovering most relevant resources by creating clear pathways for weaker students.

The Sybil Attack Large-scale peer-to-peer systems facesecurity threats from faulty or hostile remotecomputing elements. To resist these threats, manysuch systems employ redundancy. However, if asingle faulty entity can present multiple identities,it can control a substantial fraction of the system,thereby undermining this redundancy. Oneapproach to preventing these &quot;Sybil attacks&quot; is tohave a trusted agency certify identities. Thispaper shows that, without a logically centralizedauthority, Sybil...

Footprints: history-rich tools for information foraging Inspired by Hill and Hollans original work [7], we have beendeveloping a theory of interaction history and building tools toapply this theory to navigation in a complex information space. Wehave built a series of tools - map, paths, annota- tions andsignposts - based on a physical-world navigation metaphor. Thesetools have been in use for over a year. Our user study involved acontrolled browse task and showed that users were able to get thesame amount of work done with significantly less effort.

Distinctive Image Features from Scale-Invariant Keypoints This paper presents a method for extracting distinctive invariant features from images that can be used to perform reliable matching between different views of an object or scene. The features are invariant to image scale and rotation, and are shown to provide robust matching across a substantial range of affine distortion, change in 3D viewpoint, addition of noise, and change in illumination. The features are highly distinctive, in the sense that a single feature can be correctly matched with high probability against a large database of features from many images. This paper also describes an approach to using these features for object recognition. The recognition proceeds by matching individual features to a database of features from known objects using a fast nearest-neighbor algorithm, followed by a Hough transform to identify clusters belonging to a single object, and finally performing verification through least-squares solution for consistent pose parameters. This approach to recognition can robustly identify objects among clutter and occlusion while achieving near real-time performance.

Accurate Self-Localization in RFID Tag Information Grids Using FIR Filtering Grid navigation spaces nested with the radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags are promising for industrial and other needs, because each tag can deliver information about a local two-dimensional or three-dimensional surrounding. The approach, however, requires high accuracy in vehicle self-localization. Otherwise, errors may lead to collisions; possibly even fatal. We propose a new extended finite impulse response (EFIR) filtering algorithm and show that it meets this need. The EFIR filter requires an optimal averaging interval, but does not involve the noise statistics which are often not well known to the engineer. It is more accurate than the extended Kalman filter (EKF) under real operation conditions and its iterative algorithm has the Kalman form. Better performance of the proposed EFIR filter is demonstrated based on extensive simulations in a comparison to EKF, which is widely used in RFID tag grids. We also show that errors in noise covariances may provoke divergence in EKF, whereas the EFIR filter remains stable and is thus more robust.

A survey on sensor networks The advancement in wireless communications and electronics has enabled the development of low-cost sensor networks. The sensor networks can be used for various application areas (e.g., health, military, home). For different application areas, there are different technical issues that researchers are currently resolving. The current state of the art of sensor networks is captured in this article, where solutions are discussed under their related protocol stack layer sections. This article also points out the open research issues and intends to spark new interests and developments in this field.

Factual and Counterfactual Explanations for Black Box Decision Making. The rise of sophisticated machine learning models has brought accurate but obscure decision systems, which hide their logic, thus undermining transparency, trust, and the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in socially sensitive and safety-critical contexts. We introduce a local rule-based explanation method, providing faithful explanations of the decision made by a black box classifier on a ...

Multiresolution Gray-Scale and Rotation Invariant Texture Classification with Local Binary Patterns This paper presents a theoretically very simple, yet efficient, multiresolution approach to gray-scale and rotation invariant texture classification based on local binary patterns and nonparametric discrimination of sample and prototype distributions. The method is based on recognizing that certain local binary patterns, termed "uniform" are fundamental properties of local image texture and their occurrence histogram is proven to be a very powerful texture feature. We derive a generalized gray-scale and rotation invariant operator presentation that allows for detecting the "uniform" patterns for any quantization of the angular space and for any spatial resolution and presents a method for combining multiple operators for multiresolution analysis. The proposed approach is very robust in terms of gray-scale variations since the operator is, by definition, invariant against any monotonic transformation of the gray scale. Another advantage is computational simplicity as the operator can be realized with a few operations in a small neighborhood and a lookup table. Excellent experimental results obtained in true problems of rotation invariance, where the classifier is trained at one particular rotation angle and tested with samples from other rotation angles, demonstrate that good discrimination can be achieved with the occurrence statistics of simple rotation invariant local binary patterns. These operators characterize the spatial configuration of local image texture and the performance can be further improved by combining them with rotation invariant variance measures that characterize the contrast of local image texture. The joint distributions of these orthogonal measures are shown to be very powerful tools for rotation invariant texture analysis.

ML estimation of a stochastic linear system with the EM algorithm and its application to speech recognition A nontraditional approach to the problem of estimating the parameters of a stochastic linear system is presented. The method is based on the expectation-maximization algorithm and can be considered as the continuous analog of the Baum-Welch estimation algorithm for hidden Markov models. The algorithm is used for training the parameters of a dynamical system model that is proposed for better representing the spectral dynamics of speech for recognition. It is assumed that the observed feature vectors of a phone segment are the output of a stochastic linear dynamical system, and it is shown how the evolution of the dynamics as a function of the segment length can be modeled using alternative assumptions. A phoneme classification task using the TIMIT database demonstrates that the approach is the first effective use of an explicit model for statistical dependence between frames of speech

Image analysis by Bessel-Fourier moments In this paper, we proposed a new set of moments based on the Bessel function of the first kind, named Bessel-Fourier moments (BFMs), which are more suitable than orthogonal Fourier-Mellin and Zernike moments for image analysis and rotation invariant pattern recognition. Compared with orthogonal Fourier-Mellin and Zernike polynomials of the same degree, the new orthogonal radial polynomials have more zeros, and these zeros are more evenly distributed. The Bessel-Fourier moments can be thought of as generalized orthogonalized complex moments. Theoretical and experimental results show that the Bessel-Fourier moments perform better than the orthogonal Fourier-Mellin and Zernike moments (OFMMs and ZMs) in terms of image reconstruction capability and invariant recognition accuracy in noise-free, noisy and smooth distortion conditions.

Lane-level traffic estimations using microscopic traffic variables This paper proposes a novel inference method to estimate lane-level traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time on road segments where local information could not be measured and assessed directly. The main contributions of the proposed method are 1) the ability to perform lane-level estimations of traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time and 2) the ability to adapt to different traffic regimes by assessing only microscopic traffic variables. We propose a modified Kriging estimation model which explicitly takes into account both spatial and temporal variability. Performance evaluations are conducted using real-world data under different traffic regimes and it is shown that the proposed method outperforms a Kalman filter-based approach.

Convolutional Neural Network-Based Classification of Driver's Emotion during Aggressive and Smooth Driving Using Multi-Modal Camera Sensors. Because aggressive driving often causes large-scale loss of life and property, techniques for advance detection of adverse driver emotional states have become important for the prevention of aggressive driving behaviors. Previous studies have primarily focused on systems for detecting aggressive driver emotion via smart-phone accelerometers and gyro-sensors, or they focused on methods of detecting physiological signals using electroencephalography (EEG) or electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors. Because EEG and ECG sensors cause discomfort to drivers and can be detached from the driver's body, it becomes difficult to focus on bio-signals to determine their emotional state. Gyro-sensors and accelerometers depend on the performance of GPS receivers and cannot be used in areas where GPS signals are blocked. Moreover, if driving on a mountain road with many quick turns, a driver's emotional state can easily be misrecognized as that of an aggressive driver. To resolve these problems, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method of detecting emotion to identify aggressive driving using input images of the driver's face, obtained using near-infrared (NIR) light and thermal camera sensors. In this research, we conducted an experiment using our own database, which provides a high classification accuracy for detecting driver emotion leading to either aggressive or smooth (i.e., relaxed) driving. Our proposed method demonstrates better performance than existing methods.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Orthogonal moments based on exponent functions: Exponent-Fourier moments. In this paper, we propose a new set of orthogonal moments based on Exponent functions, named Exponent-Fourier moments (EFMs), which are suitable for image analysis and rotation invariant pattern recognition. Compared with Zernike polynomials of the same degree, the new radial functions have more zeros, and these zeros are evenly distributed, this property make EFMs have strong ability in describing image. Unlike Zernike moments, the kernel of computation of EFMs is extremely simple. Theoretical and experimental results show that Exponent-Fourier moments perform very well in terms of image reconstruction capability and invariant recognition accuracy in noise-free, noisy and smooth distortion conditions. The Exponent-Fourier moments can be thought of as generalized orthogonal complex moments.

Combined invariants to similarity transformation and to blur using orthogonal Zernike moments. The derivation of moment invariants has been extensively investigated in the past decades. In this paper, we construct a set of invariants derived from Zernike moments which is simultaneously invariant to similarity transformation and to convolution with circularly symmetric point spread function (PSF). Two main contributions are provided: the theoretical framework for deriving the Zernike moments of a blurred image and the way to construct the combined geometric-blur invariants. The performance of the proposed descriptors is evaluated with various PSFs and similarity transformations. The comparison of the proposed method with the existing ones is also provided in terms of pattern recognition accuracy, template matching and robustness to noise. Experimental results show that the proposed descriptors perform on the overall better.

Fast computation of Jacobi-Fourier moments for invariant image recognition The Jacobi-Fourier moments (JFMs) provide a wide class of orthogonal rotation invariant moments (ORIMs) which are useful for many image processing, pattern recognition and computer vision applications. They, however, suffer from high time complexity and numerical instability at high orders of moment. In this paper, a fast method based on the recursive computation of radial kernel function of JFMs is proposed which not only reduces time complexity but also improves their numerical stability. Fast recursive method for the computation of Jacobi-Fourier moments is proposed.The proposed method not only reduces time complexity but also improves numerical stability of moments.Better image reconstruction is achieved with lower reconstruction error.Proposed method is useful for many image processing, pattern recognition and computer vision applications.

Radial shifted Legendre moments for image analysis and invariant image recognition. The rotation, scaling and translation invariant property of image moments has a high significance in image recognition. Legendre moments as a classical orthogonal moment have been widely used in image analysis and recognition. Since Legendre moments are defined in Cartesian coordinate, the rotation invariance is difficult to achieve. In this paper, we first derive two types of transformed Legendre polynomial: substituted and weighted radial shifted Legendre polynomials. Based on these two types of polynomials, two radial orthogonal moments, named substituted radial shifted Legendre moments and weighted radial shifted Legendre moments (SRSLMs and WRSLMs) are proposed. The proposed moments are orthogonal in polar coordinate domain and can be thought as generalized and orthogonalized complex moments. They have better image reconstruction performance, lower information redundancy and higher noise robustness than the existing radial orthogonal moments. At last, a mathematical framework for obtaining the rotation, scaling and translation invariants of these two types of radial shifted Legendre moments is provided. Theoretical and experimental results show the superiority of the proposed methods in terms of image reconstruction capability and invariant recognition accuracy under both noisy and noise-free conditions.

Robust circularly orthogonal moment based on Chebyshev rational function. The circularly orthogonal moments have been widely used in many computer vision applications. Unfortunately, they suffer from two errors namely numerical integration error and geometric error, which heavily degrade their reconstruction accuracy and pattern recognition performance. This paper describes a new kind of circularly orthogonal moments based on Chebyshev rational function. Unlike the conventional circularly orthogonal moments which have been defined in a unit disk, the proposed moment is defined in whole polar coordinates domain. In addition, given an order n, its radial projection function is smoother and oscillates at lower frequency compared with the existing circularly orthogonal moments, and so it is free of the geometric error and highly robust to the numerical integration error. Experimental results indicate that the proposed moments perform better in image reconstruction and pattern classification, and yield higher tolerance to image noise and smooth distortion in comparison with the existing circularly orthogonal moments.

The modified generic polar harmonic transforms for image representation This paper introduces four classes of orthogonal transforms by modifying the generic polar harmonic transforms. Then, the rotation invariant feature of the proposed transforms is investigated. Compared with the traditional generic polar harmonic transforms, the proposed transforms have the ability to describe the central region of the image with a parameter controlling the area of the region. Experimental results verified the image representation capability of the proposed transforms and showed better performance of the proposed transform in terms of rotation invariant pattern recognition.

Segmentation-Based Image Copy-Move Forgery Detection Scheme In this paper, we propose a scheme to detect the copy-move forgery in an image, mainly by extracting the keypoints for comparison. The main difference to the traditional methods is that the proposed scheme first segments the test image into semantically independent patches prior to keypoint extraction. As a result, the copy-move regions can be detected by matching between these patches. The matching process consists of two stages. In the first stage, we find the suspicious pairs of patches that may contain copy-move forgery regions, and we roughly estimate an affine transform matrix. In the second stage, an Expectation-Maximization-based algorithm is designed to refine the estimated matrix and to confirm the existence of copy-move forgery. Experimental results prove the good performance of the proposed scheme via comparing it with the state-of-the-art schemes on the public databases.

The Sybil Attack Large-scale peer-to-peer systems facesecurity threats from faulty or hostile remotecomputing elements. To resist these threats, manysuch systems employ redundancy. However, if asingle faulty entity can present multiple identities,it can control a substantial fraction of the system,thereby undermining this redundancy. Oneapproach to preventing these &quot;Sybil attacks&quot; is tohave a trusted agency certify identities. Thispaper shows that, without a logically centralizedauthority, Sybil...

A practical tutorial on the use of nonparametric statistical tests as a methodology for comparing evolutionary and swarm intelligence algorithms The interest in nonparametric statistical analysis has grown recently in the field of computational intelligence. In many experimental studies, the lack of the required properties for a proper application of parametric procedures–independence, normality, and homoscedasticity–yields to nonparametric ones the task of performing a rigorous comparison among algorithms.

Response time in man-computer conversational transactions The literature concerning man-computer transactions abounds in controversy about the limits of "system response time" to a user's command or inquiry at a terminal. Two major semantic issues prohibit resolving this controversy. One issue centers around the question of "Response time to what?" The implication is that different human purposes and actions will have different acceptable or useful response times.

Ripple effects of an embedded social agent: a field study of a social robot in the workplace Prior research has investigated the effect of interactive social agents presented on computer screens or embodied in robots. Much of this research has been pursued in labs and brief field studies. Comparatively little is known about social agents embedded in the workplace, where employees have repeated interactions with the agent, alone and with others. We designed a social robot snack delivery service for a workplace, and evaluated the service over four months allowing each employee to use it for two months. We report on how employees responded to the robot and the service over repeated encounters. Employees attached different social roles to the robot beyond a delivery person as they incorporated the robot's visit into their workplace routines. Beyond one-on-one interaction, the robot created a ripple effect in the workplace, triggering new behaviors among employees, including politeness, protection of the robot, mimicry, social comparison, and even jealousy. We discuss the implications of these ripple effects for designing services incorporating social agents.

Cost-Effective Authentic and Anonymous Data Sharing with Forward Security Data sharing has never been easier with the advances of cloud computing, and an accurate analysis on the shared data provides an array of benefits to both the society and individuals. Data sharing with a large number of participants must take into account several issues, including efficiency, data integrity and privacy of data owner. Ring signature is a promising candidate to construct an anonymous and authentic data sharing system. It allows a data owner to anonymously authenticate his data which can be put into the cloud for storage or analysis purpose. Yet the costly certificate verification in the traditional public key infrastructure (PKI) setting becomes a bottleneck for this solution to be scalable. Identity-based (ID-based) ring signature, which eliminates the process of certificate verification, can be used instead. In this paper, we further enhance the security of ID-based ring signature by providing forward security: If a secret key of any user has been compromised, all previous generated signatures that include this user still remain valid. This property is especially important to any large scale data sharing system, as it is impossible to ask all data owners to reauthenticate their data even if a secret key of one single user has been compromised. We provide a concrete and efficient instantiation of our scheme, prove its security and provide an implementation to show its practicality.

Automated Detection of Obstructive Sleep Apnea Events from a Single-Lead Electrocardiogram Using a Convolutional Neural Network. In this study, we propose a method for the automated detection of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) from a single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) using a convolutional neural network (CNN). A CNN model was designed with six optimized convolution layers including activation, pooling, and dropout layers. One-dimensional (1D) convolution, rectified linear units (ReLU), and max pooling were applied to the convolution, activation, and pooling layers, respectively. For training and evaluation of the CNN model, a single-lead ECG dataset was collected from 82 subjects with OSA and was divided into training (including data from 63 patients with 34,281 events) and testing (including data from 19 patients with 8571 events) datasets. Using this CNN model, a precision of 0.99%, a recall of 0.99%, and an F-score of 0.99% were attained with the training dataset; these values were all 0.96% when the CNN was applied to the testing dataset. These results show that the proposed CNN model can be used to detect OSA accurately on the basis of a single-lead ECG. Ultimately, this CNN model may be used as a screening tool for those suspected to suffer from OSA.

Hardware Circuits Design and Performance Evaluation of a Soft Lower Limb Exoskeleton Soft lower limb exoskeletons (LLEs) are wearable devices that have good potential in walking rehabilitation and augmentation. While a few studies focused on the structure design and assistance force optimization of the soft LLEs, rarely work has been conducted on the hardware circuits design. The main purpose of this work is to present a new soft LLE for walking efficiency improvement and introduce its hardware circuits design. A soft LLE for hip flexion assistance and a hardware circuits system with scalability were proposed. To assess the efficacy of the soft LLE, the experimental tests that evaluate the sensor data acquisition, force tracking performance, lower limb muscle activity and metabolic cost were conducted. The time error in the peak assistance force was just 1%. The reduction in the normalized root-mean-square EMG of the rectus femoris was 7.1%. The net metabolic cost in exoskeleton on condition was reduced by 7.8% relative to walking with no exoskeleton. The results show that the designed hardware circuits can be applied to the soft LLE and the soft LLE is able to improve walking efficiency of wearers.

A Novel Unsupervised Camera-aware Domain Adaptation Framework for Person Re-identification. Unsupervised cross-domain person re-identification (Re-ID) faces two key issues. One is the data distribution discrepancy between source and target domains, and the other is the lack of labelling information in target domain. They are addressed in this paper from the perspective of representation learning. For the first issue, we highlight the presence of camera-level sub-domains as a unique characteristic of person Re-ID, and develop camera-aware domain adaptation to reduce the discrepancy not only between source and target domains but also across these sub-domains. For the second issue, we exploit the temporal continuity in each camera of target domain to create discriminative information. This is implemented by dynamically generating online triplets within each batch, in order to maximally take advantage of the steadily improved feature representation in training process. Together, the above two methods give rise to a novel unsupervised deep domain adaptation framework for person Re-ID. Experiments and ablation studies on benchmark datasets demonstrate its superiority and interesting properties.

Differentiable Learning-to-Normalize via Switchable Normalization. We address a learning-to-normalize problem by proposing Switchable Normalization (SN), which learns to select different operations for different normalization layers of a deep neural network (DNN). SN switches among three distinct scopes to compute statistics (means and variances) including a channel, a layer, and a minibatch, by learning their importance weights in an end-to-end manner. SN has several good properties. First, it adapts to various network architectures and tasks (see Fig.1). Second, it is robust to a wide range of batch sizes, maintaining high performance when small minibatch is presented (e.g. 2 images/GPU). Third, SN treats all channels as a group, unlike group normalization that searches the number of groups as a hyper-parameter. Without bells and whistles, SN outperforms its counterparts on various challenging problems, such as image classification in ImageNet, object detection and segmentation in COCO, artistic image stylization, and neural architecture search. We hope SN will help ease the usages and understand the effects of normalization techniques in deep learning. The code of SN will be made available in this https URL.

End-to-End Deep Learning for Person Search. Existing person re-identification (re-id) benchmarks and algorithms mainly focus on matching cropped pedestrian images between queries and candidates. However, it is different from real-world scenarios where the annotations of pedestrian bounding boxes are unavailable and the target person needs to be found from whole images. To close the gap, we investigate how to localize and match query persons from the scene images without relying on the annotations of candidate boxes. Instead of breaking it down into two separate tasks—pedestrian detection and person re-id, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework to jointly handle both tasks. A random sampling softmax loss is proposed to effectively train the model under the supervision of sparse and unbalanced labels. On the other hand, existing benchmarks are small in scale and the samples are collected from a few fixed camera views with low scene diversities. To address this issue, we collect a largescale and scene-diversified person search dataset, which contains 18,184 images, 8,432 persons, and 99,809 annotated bounding boxes1. We evaluate our approach and other baselines on the proposed dataset, and study the influence of various factors. Experiments show that our method achieves the best result.

Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Shot Knowledge Distillation For Image-Based Object Re-Identification Object re-identification (re-id) aims to identify a specific object across times or camera views, with the person re-id and vehicle re-id as the most widely studied applications. Re-id is challenging because of the variations in viewpoints, (human) poses, and occlusions. Multi-shots of the same object can cover diverse viewpoints/poses and thus provide more comprehensive information. In this paper, we propose exploiting the multi-shots of the same identity to guide the feature learning of each individual image. Specifically, we design an Uncertainty-aware Multi-shot Teacher-Student (UMTS) Network. It consists of a teacher network (T-net) that learns the comprehensive features from multiple images of the same object, and a student network (S-net) that takes a single image as input. In particular, we take into account the data dependent heteroscedastic uncertainty for effectively transferring the knowledge from the T-net to S-net. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to make use of multi-shots of an object in a teacher-student learning manner for effectively boosting the single image based re-id. We validate the effectiveness of our approach on the popular vehicle re-id and person re-id datasets. In inference, the S-net alone significantly outperforms the baselines and achieves the state-of-the-art performance.

Horizontal Pyramid Matching for Person Re-Identification Despite the remarkable progress in person re-identification (Re-ID), such approaches still suffer from the failure cases where the discriminative body parts are missing. To mitigate this type of failure, we propose a simple yet effective Horizontal Pyramid Matching (HPM) approach to fully exploit various partial information of a given person, so that correct person candidates can be identified even if some key parts are missing. With HPM, we make the following contributions to produce more robust feature representations for the Re-ID task: 1) we learn to classify using partial feature representations at different horizontal pyramid scales, which successfully enhance the discriminative capabilities of various person parts; 2) we exploit average and max pooling strategies to account for person-specific discriminative information in a global-local manner. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed HPM method, extensive experiments are conducted on three popular datasets including Market-1501, DukeMTMC-ReID and CUHK03. Respectively, we achieve mAP scores of 83.1%, 74.5% and 59.7% on these challenging benchmarks, which are the new state-of-the-arts.

Adaptive Transfer Network For Cross-Domain Person Re-Identification Recent deep learning based person re-identification approaches have steadily improved the performance for benchmarks, however they often fail to generalize well from one domain to another. In this work, we propose a novel adaptive transfer network (ATNet) for effective cross-domain person re-identification. ATNet looks into the essential causes of domain gap and addresses it following the principle of "divide-and-conquer". It decomposes the complicated cross-domain transfer into a set of factor-wise sub-transfers, each of which concentrates on style transfer with respect to a certain imaging factor, e.g., illumination, resolution and camera view etc. An adaptive ensemble strategy is proposed to fuse factor-wise transfers by perceiving the affect magnitudes of various factors on images. Such "decomposition-and-ensemble" strategy gives ATNet the capability of precise style transfer at factor level and eventually effective transfer across domains. In particular, ATNet consists of a transfer network composed by multiple factor-wise CycleGANs and an ensemble CycleGAN as well as a selection network that infers the affects of different factors on transferring each image. Extensive experimental results on three widely-used datasets, i.e., Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reID and PRID2011 have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed ATNet with significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art methods.

Learning Context Graph For Person Search Person re-identification has achieved great progress with deep convolutional neural networks. However, most previous methods focus on learning individual appearance feature embedding, and it is hard for the models to handle difficult situations with different illumination, large pose variance and occlusion. In this work, we take a step further and consider employing context information for person search. For a probe-gallery pair, we first propose a contextual instance expansion module, which employs a relative attention module to search and filter useful context information in the scene. We also build a graph learning framework to effectively employ context pairs to update target similarity. These two modules are built on top of a joint detection and instance feature learning framework, which improves the discriminativeness of the learned features. The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely used person search datasets.

Enhanced Deep Residual Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution. Recent research on super-resolution has progressed with the development of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN). In particular, residual learning techniques exhibit improved performance. In this paper, we develop an enhanced deep super-resolution network (EDSR) with performance exceeding those of current state-of-the-art SR methods. The significant performance improvement of our model is due to optimization by removing unnecessary modules in conventional residual networks. The performance is further improved by expanding the model size while we stabilize the training procedure. We also propose a new multi-scale deep super-resolution system (MDSR) and training method, which can reconstruct high-resolution images of different upscaling factors in a single model. The proposed methods show superior performance over the state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets and prove its excellence by winning the NTIRE2017 Super-Resolution Challenge [26].

Digital games in the classroom? A contextual approach to teachers' adoption intention of digital games in formal education Interest in using digital games for formal education has steadily increased in the past decades. When it comes to actual use, however, the uptake of games in the classroom remains limited. Using a contextual approach, the possible influence of factors on a school (N=60) and teacher (N=409) level are analyzed. Findings indicate that there is no effect of factors on the school level whereas on a teacher level, a model is tested, explaining 68% of the variance in behavioral intention, in which curriculum-relatedness and previous experience function as crucial determinants of the adoption intention. These findings add to previous research on adoption determinants related to digital games in formal education. Furthermore, they provide insight into the relations between different adoption determinants and their association with behavioral intention.

Response time in man-computer conversational transactions The literature concerning man-computer transactions abounds in controversy about the limits of "system response time" to a user's command or inquiry at a terminal. Two major semantic issues prohibit resolving this controversy. One issue centers around the question of "Response time to what?" The implication is that different human purposes and actions will have different acceptable or useful response times.

Stabilization of switched continuous-time systems with all modes unstable via dwell time switching Stabilization of switched systems composed fully of unstable subsystems is one of the most challenging problems in the field of switched systems. In this brief paper, a sufficient condition ensuring the asymptotic stability of switched continuous-time systems with all modes unstable is proposed. The main idea is to exploit the stabilization property of switching behaviors to compensate the state divergence made by unstable modes. Then, by using a discretized Lyapunov function approach, a computable sufficient condition for switched linear systems is proposed in the framework of dwell time; it is shown that the time intervals between two successive switching instants are required to be confined by a pair of upper and lower bounds to guarantee the asymptotic stability. Based on derived results, an algorithm is proposed to compute the stability region of admissible dwell time. A numerical example is proposed to illustrate our approach.

A novel data hiding for color images based on pixel value difference and modulus function This paper proposes a novel data hiding method using pixel-value difference and modulus function for color image with the large embedding capacity(hiding 810757 bits in a 512 512 host image at least) and a high-visual-quality of the cover image. The proposed method has fully taken into account the correlation of the R, G and B plane of a color image. The amount of information embedded the R plane and the B plane determined by the difference of the corresponding pixel value between the G plane and the median of G pixel value in each pixel block. Furthermore, two sophisticated pixel value adjustment processes are provided to maintain the division consistency and to solve underflow and overflow problems. The most importance is that the secret data are completely extracted through the mathematical theoretical proof.

OSMnx: New Methods for Acquiring, Constructing, Analyzing, and Visualizing Complex Street Networks. Urban scholars have studied street networks in various ways, but there are data availability and consistency limitations to the current urban planning/street network analysis literature. To address these challenges, this article presents OSMnx, a new tool to make the collection of data and creation and analysis of street networks simple, consistent, automatable and sound from the perspectives of graph theory, transportation, and urban design. OSMnx contributes five significant capabilities for researchers and practitioners: first, the automated downloading of political boundaries and building footprints; second, the tailored and automated downloading and constructing of street network data from OpenStreetMap; third, the algorithmic correction of network topology; fourth, the ability to save street networks to disk as shapefiles, GraphML, or SVG files; and fifth, the ability to analyze street networks, including calculating routes, projecting and visualizing networks, and calculating metric and topological measures. These measures include those common in urban design and transportation studies, as well as advanced measures of the structure and topology of the network. Finally, this article presents a simple case study using OSMnx to construct and analyze street networks in Portland, Oregon.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Adaptive Neural Network Finite-Time Output Feedback Control of Quantized Nonlinear Systems. This paper addresses the finite-time tracking issue for nonlinear quantized systems with unmeasurable states. Compared with the existing researches, the finite-time quantized feedback control is considered for the first time. By proposing a new finite-time stability criterion and designing a state observer, a novel adaptive neural output-feedback control strategy is raised by backstepping techniqu...

Fuzzy Adaptive Tracking Control of Wheeled Mobile Robots With State-Dependent Kinematic and Dynamic Disturbances Unlike most works based on pure nonholonomic constraint, this paper proposes a fuzzy adaptive tracking control method for wheeled mobile robots, where unknown slippage occurs and violates the nonholononomic constraint in the form of state-dependent kinematic and dynamic disturbances. These disturbances degrade tracking performance significantly and, therefore, should be compensated. To this end, the kinematics with state-dependent disturbances are rigorously derived based on the general form of slippage in the mobile robots, and fuzzy adaptive observers together with parameter adaptation laws are designed to estimate the state-dependent disturbances in both kinematics and dynamics. Because of the modular structure of the proposed method, it can be easily combined with the previous controllers based on the model with the pure nonholonomic constraint, such that the combination of the fuzzy adaptive observers with the previously proposed backstepping-like feedback linearization controller can guarantee the trajectory tracking errors to be globally ultimately bounded, even when the nonholonomic constraint is violated, and their ultimate bounds can be adjusted appropriately for various types of trajectories in the presence of large initial tracking errors and disturbances. Both the stability analysis and simulation results are provided to validate the proposed controller.

Leader-following consensus in second-order multi-agent systems with input time delay: An event-triggered sampling approach. This paper analytically investigates an event-triggered leader-following consensus in second-order multi-agent systems with time delay in the control input. Each agent׳s update of control input is driven by properly defined event, which depends on the measurement error, the states of its neighboring agents at their individual time instants, and an exponential decay function. Necessary and sufficient conditions are presented to ensure a leader-following consensus. Moreover, the control is updated only when the event-triggered condition is satisfied, which significantly decreases the number of communication among nodes, avoided effectively the continuous communication of the information channel among agents and excluded the Zeno-behavior of triggering time sequences. A numerical simulation example is given to illustrate the theoretical results.

Adaptive neural control for a class of stochastic nonlinear systems by backstepping approach. This paper addresses adaptive neural control for a class of stochastic nonlinear systems which are not in strict-feedback form. Based on the structural characteristics of radial basis function (RBF) neural networks (NNs), a backstepping design approach is extended from stochastic strict-feedback systems to a class of more general stochastic nonlinear systems. In the control design procedure, RBF NNs are used to approximate unknown nonlinear functions and the backstepping technique is utilized to construct the desired controller. The proposed adaptive neural controller guarantees that all the closed-loop signals are bounded and the tracking error converges to a sufficiently small neighborhood of the origin. Two simulation examples are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Prescribed Performance Adaptive Fuzzy Containment Control for Nonlinear Multiagent Systems Using Disturbance Observer This article focuses on the containment control problem for nonlinear multiagent systems (MASs) with unknown disturbance and prescribed performance in the presence of dead-zone output. The fuzzy-logic systems (FLSs) are used to approximate the unknown nonlinear function, and a nonlinear disturbance observer is used to estimate unknown external disturbances. Meanwhile, a new distributed containment control scheme is developed by utilizing the adaptive compensation technique without assumption of the boundary value of unknown disturbance. Furthermore, a Nussbaum function is utilized to cope with the unknown control coefficient, which is caused by the nonlinearity in the output mechanism. Moreover, a second-order tracking differentiator (TD) is introduced to avoid the repeated differentiation of the virtual controller. The outputs of the followers converge to the convex hull spanned by the multiple dynamic leaders. It is shown that all the signals are semiglobally uniformly ultimately bounded (SGUUB), and the local neighborhood containment errors can converge into the prescribed boundary. Finally, the effectiveness of the approach proposed in this article is illustrated by simulation results.

Adaptive Event-Triggered Control of Uncertain Nonlinear Systems Using Intermittent Output Only Although rich collection of research results on event-triggered control exist, no effort has ever been made in integrating state/output triggering and controller triggering simultaneously with backstepping control design. The primary objective of this article is, by using intermittent output signal only, to build a backstepping adaptive event-triggered feedback control for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems. To do so, we need to tackle three technical obstacles. First, the nature of the event triggering makes the transmitted output signal discontinuous, rendering the regular recursive backstepping design method inapplicable as the repetitive differentiation of virtual control signals is literally undefined. Second, the effects arisen from the event-triggering action must be properly accommodated, but the current compensating method only works for systems in normal form, thus a new method needs to be developed in order to handle nonnormal form systems. Third, as only intermittent output signal is available, and at the same time, the impacts of certain terms containing unknown parameters (arising from event triggering) need to be compensated, it is rather challenging to design a suitable state observer. To circumvent these difficulties, we employ the dynamic filtering technique to avoid the differentiation of virtual control signals in the backstepping design, construct a new compensation scheme to deal with the effects of output triggering, and build a new form of state observer to facilitate the development of output feedback control. It is shown that, with the derived adaptive backstepping output-triggered control, all the closed-loop signals are ensured bounded and the transient system performance in the mean square error sense can be adjusted by appropriately adjusting design parameters. The benefits and effectiveness of the proposed scheme are also validated by numerical simulation.

Finite-Time-Prescribed Performance-Based Adaptive Fuzzy Control for Strict-Feedback Nonlinear Systems With Dynamic Uncertainty and Actuator Faults In this article, finite-time-prescribed performance-based adaptive fuzzy control is considered for a class of strict-feedback systems in the presence of actuator faults and dynamic disturbances. To deal with the difficulties associated with the actuator faults and external disturbance, an adaptive fuzzy fault-tolerant control strategy is introduced. Different from the existing controller design methods, a modified performance function, which is called the finite-time performance function (FTPF), is presented. It is proved that the presented controller can ensure all the signals of the closed-loop system are bounded and the tracking error converges to a predetermined region in finite time. The effectiveness of the presented control scheme is verified through the simulation results.

Parameter-Dependent LMIs in Robust Analysis: Characterization of Homogeneous Polynomially Parameter-Dependent Solutions Via LMI Relaxations This note investigates the robust stability of uncertain linear time-invariant systems in polytopic domains by means of parameter-dependent linear matrix inequality (PD-LMI) conditions, exploiting some algebraic properties provided by the uncertainty representation. A systematic procedure to construct a family of finite-dimensional LMI relaxations is provided. The robust stability is assessed by means of the existence of a Lyapunov function, more specifically, a homogeneous polynomially parameter-dependent Lyapunov (HPPDL) function of arbitrary degree. For a given degree , if an HPPDL solution exists, a sequence of relaxations based on real algebraic properties provides sufficient LMI conditions of increasing precision and constant number of decision variables for the existence of an HPPDL function which tend to the necessity. Alternatively, if an HPPDL solution of degree exists, a sequence of relaxations which increases the number of variables and the number of LMIs will provide an HPPDL solution of larger degree. The method proposed can be applied to determine homogeneous parameter-dependent matrix solutions to a wide variety of PD-LMIs by transforming the infinite-dimensional LMI problem described in terms of uncertain parameters belonging to the unit simplex in a sequence of finite-dimensional LMI conditions which converges to the necessary conditions for the existence of a homogeneous polynomially parameter-dependent solution of arbitrary degree. Illustrative examples show the efficacy of the proposed conditions when compared with other methods from the literature.

Neural network approach to continuous-time direct adaptive optimal control for partially unknown nonlinear systems. In this paper we present in a continuous-time framework an online approach to direct adaptive optimal control with infinite horizon cost for nonlinear systems. The algorithm converges online to the optimal control solution without knowledge of the internal system dynamics. Closed-loop dynamic stability is guaranteed throughout. The algorithm is based on a reinforcement learning scheme, namely Policy Iterations, and makes use of neural networks, in an Actor/Critic structure, to parametrically represent the control policy and the performance of the control system. The two neural networks are trained to express the optimal controller and optimal cost function which describes the infinite horizon control performance. Convergence of the algorithm is proven under the realistic assumption that the two neural networks do not provide perfect representations for the nonlinear control and cost functions. The result is a hybrid control structure which involves a continuous-time controller and a supervisory adaptation structure which operates based on data sampled from the plant and from the continuous-time performance dynamics. Such control structure is unlike any standard form of controllers previously seen in the literature. Simulation results, obtained considering two second-order nonlinear systems, are provided.

Digital games in the classroom? A contextual approach to teachers' adoption intention of digital games in formal education Interest in using digital games for formal education has steadily increased in the past decades. When it comes to actual use, however, the uptake of games in the classroom remains limited. Using a contextual approach, the possible influence of factors on a school (N=60) and teacher (N=409) level are analyzed. Findings indicate that there is no effect of factors on the school level whereas on a teacher level, a model is tested, explaining 68% of the variance in behavioral intention, in which curriculum-relatedness and previous experience function as crucial determinants of the adoption intention. These findings add to previous research on adoption determinants related to digital games in formal education. Furthermore, they provide insight into the relations between different adoption determinants and their association with behavioral intention.

Robust State-Dependent Switching of Linear Systems With Dwell Time. A state-dependent switching law that obeys a dwell time constraint and guarantees the stability of a switched linear system is designed. Sufficient conditions are obtained for the stability of the switched systems when the switching law is applied in presence of polytopic type parameter uncertainty. A Lyapunov function, in quadratic form, is assigned to each subsystem such that it is non-increasing at the switching instants. During the dwell time, this function varies piecewise linearly in time. After the dwell, the system switches if the switching results in a decrease in the value of the LF. The method proposed is also applicable to robust stabilization via state-feedback. It is further extended to guarantee a bound on the L 2 -gain of the switching system; it is also used in deriving state-feedback control law that robustly achieves a prescribed L 2 -gain bound.

Towards Empathic Virtual and Robotic Tutors.

Time Series Anomaly Detection for Trustworthy Services in Cloud Computing Systems As a powerful architecture for large-scale computation, cloud computing has revolutionized the way that computing infrastructure is abstracted and utilized. Coupled with the challenges caused by Big Data, the rocketing development of cloud computing boosts the complexity of system management and maintenance, resulting in weakened trustworthiness of cloud services. To cope with this problem, a comp...

Energy harvesting algorithm considering max flow problem in wireless sensor networks. In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), sensor nodes with poor energy always have bad effect on the data rate or max flow. These nodes are called bottleneck nodes. In this paper, in order to increase the max flow, we assume an energy harvesting WSNs environment to investigate the cooperation of multiple Mobile Chargers (MCs). MCs are mobile robots that use wireless charging technology to charge sensor nodes in WSNs. This means that in energy harvesting WSNs environments, sensor nodes can obtain energy replenishment by using MCs or collecting energy from nature by themselves. In our research, we use MCs to improve the energy of the sensor nodes by performing multiple rounds of unified scheduling, and finally achieve the purpose of increasing the max flow at sinks. Firstly, we model this problem as a Linear Programming (LP) to search the max flow in a round of charging scheduling and prove that the problem is NP-hard. In order to solve the problem, we propose a heuristic approach: deploying MCs in units of paths with the lowest energy node priority. To reduce the energy consumption of MCs and increase the charging efficiency, we also take the optimization of MCs’ moving distance into our consideration. Finally, we extend the method to multiple rounds of scheduling called BottleNeck. Simulation results show that Bottleneck performs well at increasing max flow.

Consensus Control Under Communication Delay in a Three-Robot System: Design and Experiments A consensus-control protocol is designed and implemented here on a three-robot system arranged on a horizontal platform, in which a camera system is used to track robot positions, and a personal computer broadcasts commands to the robots based on this protocol via a Bluetooth connection, where such commands are affected by time delays. The design involves some salient features of this protocol based on a graph-based approach, an input–output linearization scheme, and addressing uncertainties in the control problem. By implementing this design on experiments, we show that consensus of the robots can be successfully achieved, and their speed of reaching consensus can be systematically improved. Experimental results also strongly agree with those obtained from nonlinear simulations.

Self-triggered coordination of robotic networks for optimal deployment This paper studies a deployment problem for a group of robots where individual agents operate with outdated information about each other's locations. Our objective is to understand to what extent outdated information is still useful and at which point it becomes essential to obtain new, up-to-date information. We propose a self-triggered coordination algorithm based on spatial partitioning techniques with uncertain information. We analyze its correctness in synchronous and asynchronous scenarios, and establish the same convergence guarantees that a synchronous algorithm with perfect information at all times would achieve. The technical approach combines computational geometry, set-valued stability analysis, and event-based systems.

Robust Control for Mobility and Wireless Communication in Cyber-Physical Systems With Application to Robot Teams. In this paper, a system architecture to provide end-to-end network connectivity for autonomous teams of robots is discussed. The core of the proposed system is a cyber-physical controller whose goal is to ensure network connectivity as robots move to accomplish their assigned tasks. Due to channel quality uncertainties inherent to wireless propagation, we adopt a stochastic model where achievable ...

Active Target Tracking with Self-Triggered Communications in Multi-Robot Teams. We study the problem of reducing the amount of communication in decentralized target tracking. We focus on the scenario, where a team of robots is allowed to move on the boundary of the environment. Their goal is to seek a formation so as to best track a target moving in the interior of the environment. The robots are capable of measuring distances to the target. Decentralized control strategies have been proposed in the past, which guarantees that the robots asymptotically converge to the optimal formation. However, existing methods require that the robots exchange information with their neighbors at all time steps. Instead, we focus on decentralized strategies to reduce the amount of communication among robots. We propose a self-triggered communication strategy that decides when a particular robot should seek up-to-date information from its neighbors and when it is safe to operate with possibly outdated information. We prove that this strategy converges asymptotically to the desired formation when the target is stationary. For the case of a mobile target, we use a decentralized Kalman filter with covariance intersection to share the beliefs of neighboring robots. We evaluate all the approaches through simulations and a proof-of-concept experiment. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Note to Practitioners</italic> —We study the problem of tracking a target using a team of coordinating robots. Target tracking problems are prevalent in a number of applications, such as co-robots, surveillance, and wildlife monitoring. Coordination between robots typically requires communication amongst them. Most multi-robot coordination algorithms implicitly assume that the robots can communicate at all time steps. Communication can be a considerable source of energy consumption, especially for small robots. Furthermore, communicating at all time steps may be redundant in many settings. With this as motivation, we propose an algorithm where the robots do not necessarily communicate at all times and instead choose specific triggering time instances to share information with their neighbors. Despite the limitation of limited communication, we show that the algorithm converges to the optimal configuration both in theory as well as in simulations.

Cooperative Localization Under Limited Connectivity In this article, we report two decentralized multiagent cooperative localization algorithms in which, to reduce the communication cost, interagent state estimate correlations are not maintained but accounted for implicitly. In our first algorithm, to guarantee filter consistency, we account for unknown interagent correlations via an upper bound on the joint covariance matrix of the agents. In the second method, we use an optimization framework to estimate the unknown interagent cross-covariance matrix. In our algorithms, each agent localizes itself in a global coordinate frame using a local filter driven by local dead reckoning and occasional absolute measurement updates, and opportunistically corrects its pose estimate whenever it can obtain relative measurements with respect to other mobile agents. To process any relative measurement, only the agent that has taken the measurement and the agent the measurement is taken from need to communicate with each other. Consequently, our algorithms are decentralized algorithms that do not impose restrictive network-wide connectivity condition. Moreover, we make no assumptions about the type of agents or relative measurements. We demonstrate our algorithms in simulation and a robotic experiment.

Communication in reactive multiagent robotic systems Multiple cooperating robots are able to complete many tasks more quickly and reliably than one robot alone. Communication between the robots can multiply their capabilities and effectiveness, but to what extent? In this research, the importance of communication in robotic societies is investigated through experiments on both simulated and real robots. Performance was measured for three different types of communication for three different tasks. The levels of communication are progressively more complex and potentially more expensive to implement. For some tasks, communication can significantly improve performance, but for others inter-agent communication is apparently unnecessary. In cases where communication helps, the lowest level of communication is almost as effective as the more complex type. The bulk of these results are derived from thousands of simulations run with randomly generated initial conditions. The simulation results help determine appropriate parameters for the reactive control system which was ported for tests on Denning mobile robots.

Footprints: history-rich tools for information foraging Inspired by Hill and Hollans original work [7], we have beendeveloping a theory of interaction history and building tools toapply this theory to navigation in a complex information space. Wehave built a series of tools - map, paths, annota- tions andsignposts - based on a physical-world navigation metaphor. Thesetools have been in use for over a year. Our user study involved acontrolled browse task and showed that users were able to get thesame amount of work done with significantly less effort.

Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition. In this work we investigate the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting. Our main contribution is a thorough evaluation of networks of increasing depth using an architecture with very small (3x3) convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 weight layers. These findings were the basis of our ImageNet Challenge 2014 submission, where our team secured the first and the second places in the localisation and classification tracks respectively. We also show that our representations generalise well to other datasets, where they achieve state-of-the-art results. We have made our two best-performing ConvNet models publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of deep visual representations in computer vision.

Chimp optimization algorithm. •A novel optimizer called Chimp Optimization Algorithm (ChOA) is proposed.•ChOA is inspired by individual intelligence and sexual motivation of chimps.•ChOA alleviates the problems of slow convergence rate and trapping in local optima.•The four main steps of Chimp hunting are implemented.

The contourlet transform: an efficient directional multiresolution image representation. The limitations of commonly used separable extensions of one-dimensional transforms, such as the Fourier and wavelet transforms, in capturing the geometry of image edges are well known. In this paper, we pursue a "true" two-dimensional transform that can capture the intrinsic geometrical structure that is key in visual information. The main challenge in exploring geometry in images comes from the discrete nature of the data. Thus, unlike other approaches, such as curvelets, that first develop a transform in the continuous domain and then discretize for sampled data, our approach starts with a discrete-domain construction and then studies its convergence to an expansion in the continuous domain. Specifically, we construct a discrete-domain multiresolution and multidirection expansion using nonseparable filter banks, in much the same way that wavelets were derived from filter banks. This construction results in a flexible multiresolution, local, and directional image expansion using contour segments, and, thus, it is named the contourlet transform. The discrete contourlet transform has a fast iterated filter bank algorithm that requires an order N operations for N-pixel images. Furthermore, we establish a precise link between the developed filter bank and the associated continuous-domain contourlet expansion via a directional multiresolution analysis framework. We show that with parabolic scaling and sufficient directional vanishing moments, contourlets achieve the optimal approximation rate for piecewise smooth functions with discontinuities along twice continuously differentiable curves. Finally, we show some numerical experiments demonstrating the potential of contourlets in several image processing applications. Index Terms-Contourlets, contours, filter banks, geometric image processing, multidirection, multiresolution, sparse representation, wavelets.

Cognitive Cars: A New Frontier for ADAS Research This paper provides a survey of recent works on cognitive cars with a focus on driver-oriented intelligent vehicle motion control. The main objective here is to clarify the goals and guidelines for future development in the area of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADASs). Two major research directions are investigated and discussed in detail: 1) stimuli–decisions–actions, which focuses on the driver side, and 2) perception enhancement–action-suggestion–function-delegation, which emphasizes the ADAS side. This paper addresses the important achievements and major difficulties of each direction and discusses how to combine the two directions into a single integrated system to obtain safety and comfort while driving. Other related topics, including driver training and infrastructure design, are also studied.

Finite-approximation-error-based discrete-time iterative adaptive dynamic programming. In this paper, a new iterative adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm is developed to solve optimal control problems for infinite horizon discrete-time nonlinear systems with finite approximation errors. First, a new generalized value iteration algorithm of ADP is developed to make the iterative performance index function converge to the solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. The ...

Robust Sparse Linear Discriminant Analysis Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a very popular supervised feature extraction method and has been extended to different variants. However, classical LDA has the following problems: 1) The obtained discriminant projection does not have good interpretability for features. 2) LDA is sensitive to noise. 3) LDA is sensitive to the selection of number of projection directions. In this paper, a novel feature extraction method called robust sparse linear discriminant analysis (RSLDA) is proposed to solve the above problems. Specifically, RSLDA adaptively selects the most discriminative features for discriminant analysis by introducing the l2;1 norm. An orthogonal matrix and a sparse matrix are also simultaneously introduced to guarantee that the extracted features can hold the main energy of the original data and enhance the robustness to noise, and thus RSLDA has the potential to perform better than other discriminant methods. Extensive experiments on six databases demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the competitive performance compared with other state-of-the-art feature extraction methods. Moreover, the proposed method is robust to the noisy data. IEEE

Ethical Considerations Of Applying Robots In Kindergarten Settings: Towards An Approach From A Macroperspective In child-robot interaction (cHRI) research, many studies pursue the goal to develop interactive systems that can be applied in everyday settings. For early education, increasingly, the setting of a kindergarten is targeted. However, when cHRI and research are brought into a kindergarten, a range of ethical and related procedural aspects have to be considered and dealt with. While ethical models elaborated within other human-robot interaction settings, e.g., assisted living contexts, can provide some important indicators for relevant issues, we argue that it is important to start developing a systematic approach to identify and tackle those ethical issues which rise with cHRI in kindergarten settings on a more global level and address the impact of the technology from a macroperspective beyond the effects on the individual. Based on our experience in conducting studies with children in general and pedagogical considerations on the role of the institution of kindergarten in specific, in this paper, we enfold some relevant aspects that have barely been addressed in an explicit way in current cHRI research. Four areas are analyzed and key ethical issues are identified in each area: (1) the institutional setting of a kindergarten, (2) children as a vulnerable group, (3) the caregivers' role, and (4) pedagogical concepts. With our considerations, we aim at (i) broadening the methodology of the current studies within the area of cHRI, (ii) revalidate it based on our comprehensive empirical experience with research in kindergarten settings, both laboratory and real-world contexts, and (iii) provide a framework for the development of a more systematic approach to address the ethical issues in cHRI research within kindergarten settings.

Perimeter Control of Multiregion Urban Traffic Networks With Time-Varying Delays In this paper, an adaptive perimeter control problem is studied for urban traffic networks with multiple regions, time-varying state, and input delays. After defining state variables by partition the accumulation variable of each region, a system model is formulated as nonlinear ordinary differential equations based on the concept of macroscopic fundamental diagram. Both the travel times of vehicles as well as evacuation process of traffic jams are first introduced into the system dynamics, and they are modeled as input and state delays, respectively. The control objective is to stabilize the number of vehicles in each region to desired values. By employing the model reference adaptive control scheme and asymptotical sliding mode technique, two filters and adaptive laws for control parameters are designed by using only the information of the reference model. With properly constructed Lyapunov functions, the stability of tracking error with regard to the reference signals is analyzed. Lastly, a simulation example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Generalized dilations and numerically solving discrete-time homogeneous optimization problems We introduce generalized dilations, a broader class of operators than that of dilations, and consider homogeneity with respect to this new class of dilations. For discrete-time systems that are asymptotically controllable and homogeneous (with degree zero) we propose a method to numerically approximate any homogeneous value function (solution to an infinite horizon optimization problem) to arbitrary accuracy. We also show that the method can be used to generate an offline computed stabilizing feedback law.

Delay-independent stability of homogeneous systems. A class of nonlinear systems with homogeneous right-hand sides and time-varying delay is studied. It is assumed that the trivial solution of a system is asymptotically stable when delay is equal to zero. By the usage of the Lyapunov direct method and the Razumikhin approach, it is proved that the asymptotic stability of the zero solution of the system is preserved for an arbitrary continuous nonnegative and bounded delay. The conditions of stability of time-delay systems by homogeneous approximation are obtained. Furthermore, it is shown that the presented approaches permit to derive delay-independent stability conditions for some types of nonlinear systems with distributed delay. Two examples of nonlinear oscillatory systems are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of our results.

Generative Adversarial Networks for Parallel Transportation Systems. Generative Adversaria Networks (GANs) have emerged as a promising and effective mechanism for machine learning due to its recent successful applications. GANs share the same idea of producing, testing, acquiring, and utilizing data as well as knowledge based on artificial systems, computational experiments, and parallel execution of actual and virtual scenarios, as outlined in the theory of parall...

A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Autonomous Decision Making of Intelligent Vehicles on Highways Autonomous decision making is a critical and difficult task for intelligent vehicles in dynamic transportation environments. In this paper, a reinforcement learning approach with value function approximation and feature learning is proposed for autonomous decision making of intelligent vehicles on highways. In the proposed approach, the sequential decision making problem for lane changing and overtaking is modeled as a Markov decision process with multiple goals, including safety, speediness, smoothness, etc. In order to learn optimized policies for autonomous decision-making, a multiobjective approximate policy iteration (MO-API) algorithm is presented. The features for value function approximation are learned in a data-driven way, where sparse kernel-based features or manifold-based features can be constructed based on data samples. Compared with previous RL algorithms such as multiobjective Q-learning, the MO-API approach uses data-driven feature representation for value and policy approximation so that better learning efficiency can be achieved. A highway simulation environment using a 14 degree-of-freedom vehicle dynamics model was established to generate training data and test the performance of different decision-making methods for intelligent vehicles on highways. The results illustrate the advantages of the proposed MO-API method under different traffic conditions. Furthermore, we also tested the learned decision policy on a real autonomous vehicle to implement overtaking decision and control under normal traffic on highways. The experimental results also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

MFR-CNN: Incorporating Multi-Scale Features and Global Information for Traffic Object Detection. Object detection plays an important role in intelligent transportation systems and intelligent vehicles. Although the topic of object detection has been studied for decades, it is still challenging to accurately detect objects under complex scenarios. The contributing factors for challenges include diversified object and background appearance, motion blur, adverse weather conditions, and complex i...

Finite-Time Stability of Homogeneous Impulsive Positive Systems of Degree One This paper investigates the finite-time stability (FTS) of a special class of hybrid systems, namely homogeneous impulsive positive systems of degree one. By using max-separable Lyapunov functions together with average impulsive interval method, a sufficient FTS criterion is obtained for homogeneous impulsive positive systems of degree one. It should be noted that it’s the first time that the FTS result for homogeneous impulsive positive systems of degree one is given. Finally, some numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented theoretical results.

Reduction of Uncertainties for Safety Assessment of Automated Driving Under Parallel Simulations Many achievements concerning developments in the field of automated driving have been made. However, automated driving still faces the challenge of safety validation. Conventional methods are not suitable any more for this highly complex automation system. Therefore, the method named Virtual Assessment of Automation in Field Operation (VAAFO) is motivated. In this approach, automated driving system has no access to actuators but rather runs parallel to the human driver. Consequently, this approach is divided into two modules: online trajectory comparison and offline safety assessment. This paper focuses on the second module, in which uncertainties in world model are reduced and then the safety of Automated Vehicle (AV) is evaluated. Retrospective post-processing combined with Joint Integrated Probabilistic Data Association (JIPDA) tracker is put forward to reduce existence uncertainties. State uncertainties are reduced by an Unscented Rauch-Tung-Striebel smoother (URTSS). Furthermore, inverse TTC and remaining lateral distance are utilized to assess the safety of AV in the corrected world model. The results demonstrate that retrospective post-processing combined with JIPDA can reduce existence uncertainties greatly. URTSS is very useful for reducing state uncertainties. The studied case illustrates that the safety of AV can be assessed by parallel running and critical scenarios are found accordingly.

Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition. In this work we investigate the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting. Our main contribution is a thorough evaluation of networks of increasing depth using an architecture with very small (3x3) convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 weight layers. These findings were the basis of our ImageNet Challenge 2014 submission, where our team secured the first and the second places in the localisation and classification tracks respectively. We also show that our representations generalise well to other datasets, where they achieve state-of-the-art results. We have made our two best-performing ConvNet models publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of deep visual representations in computer vision.

Attribute-based encryption for fine-grained access control of encrypted data As more sensitive data is shared and stored by third-party sites on the Internet, there will be a need to encrypt data stored at these sites. One drawback of encrypting data, is that it can be selectively shared only at a coarse-grained level (i.e., giving another party your private key). We develop a new cryptosystem for fine-grained sharing of encrypted data that we call Key-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (KP-ABE). In our cryptosystem, ciphertexts are labeled with sets of attributes and private keys are associated with access structures that control which ciphertexts a user is able to decrypt. We demonstrate the applicability of our construction to sharing of audit-log information and broadcast encryption. Our construction supports delegation of private keys which subsumesHierarchical Identity-Based Encryption (HIBE).

Tabu search based multi-watermarks embedding algorithm with multiple description coding Digital watermarking is a useful solution for digital rights management systems, and it has been a popular research topic in the last decade. Most watermarking related literature focuses on how to resist deliberate attacks by applying benchmarks to watermarked media that assess the effectiveness of the watermarking algorithm. Only a few papers have concentrated on the error-resilient transmission of watermarked media. In this paper, we propose an innovative algorithm for vector quantization (VQ) based image watermarking, which is suitable for error-resilient transmission over noisy channels. By incorporating watermarking with multiple description coding (MDC), the scheme we propose to embed multiple watermarks can effectively overcome channel impairments while retaining the capability for copyright and ownership protection. In addition, we employ an optimization technique, called tabu search, to optimize both the watermarked image quality and the robustness of the extracted watermarks. We have obtained promising simulation results that demonstrate the utility and practicality of our algorithm. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Control and Optimization of Grid-Tied Photovoltaic Storage Systems Using Model Predictive Control. In this paper, we develop optimization and control methods for a grid-tied photovoltaic (PV) storage system. The storage component consists of two separate units, a large slower moving unit for energy shifting and arbitrage and a small rapid charging unit for smoothing. We use a Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework to allow the units to automatically and dynamically adapt to changes in PV outp...

Container-as-a-Service at the Edge: Trade-off between Energy Efficiency and Service Availability at Fog Nano Data Centers. In the last few years, we have witnessed the huge popularity of one of the most promising technologies of the modern era: the Internet of Things. In IoT, various smart objects (smart sensors, embedded devices, PDAs, and smartphones) share their data with one another irrespective of their geographical locations using the Internet. The amount of data generated by these connected smart objects will b...

Average Peak Age of Information in Underwater Information Collection With Sleep-Scheduling We investigate the peak age of information (PAoI) in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs), where Internet of underwater things (IoUT) nodes transmit the latest packets to the sink node, which is in charge of adjusting the sleep-scheduling to match network demands. In order to reduce PAoI, we propose active queue management (AQM) policy of the IoUT node, beneficially compresses the packets having large waiting time. Moreover, we deduce the closed-form expressions of the average PAoI as well as the energy cost relying on probability generating function and matrix-geometric solutions. Numerical results verify that the IoUT node relying on the AQM policy has a lower PAoI and energy cost in comparison to those using non-AQM policy.

Gender and Dialect Bias in YouTube's Automatic Captions.

Racial Disparity in Natural Language Processing: A Case Study of Social Media African-American English. We highlight an important frontier in algorithmic fairness: disparity in the quality of natural language processing algorithms when applied to language from authors of different social groups. For example, current systems sometimes analyze the language of females and minorities more poorly than they do of whites and males. We conduct an empirical analysis of racial disparity in language identification for tweets written in African-American English, and discuss implications of disparity in NLP.

The Social Impact Of Natural Language Processing Medical sciences have long since established an ethics code for experiments, to minimize the risk of harm to subjects. Natural language processing (NLP) used to involve mostly anonymous corpora, with the goal of enriching linguistic analysis, and was therefore unlikely to raise ethical concerns. As NLP becomes increasingly wide-spread and uses more data from social media, however, the situation has changed: the outcome of NLP experiments and applications can now have a direct effect on individual users' lives. Until now, the discourse on this topic in the field has not followed the technological development, while public discourse was often focused on exaggerated dangers. This position paper tries to take back the initiative and start a discussion. We identify a number of social implications of NLP and discuss their ethical significance, as well as ways to address them.

On the (im)possibility of fairness. What does it mean for an algorithm to be fair? Different papers use different notions of algorithmic fairness, and although these appear internally consistent, they also seem mutually incompatible. present a mathematical setting in which the distinctions in previous papers can be made formal. In addition to characterizing the spaces of inputs (the observed space) and outputs (the space), we introduce the notion of a construct space: a space that captures unobservable, but meaningful variables for the prediction. We show that in order to prove desirable properties of the entire decision-making process, different mechanisms for fairness require different assumptions about the nature of the mapping from construct space to decision space. The results in this paper imply that future treatments of algorithmic fairness should more explicitly state assumptions about the relationship between constructs and observations.

Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale. The damage personal attacks cause to online discourse motivates many platforms to try to curb the phenomenon. However, understanding the prevalence and impact of personal attacks in online platforms at scale remains surprisingly difficult. The contribution of this paper is to develop and illustrate a method that combines crowdsourcing and machine learning to analyze personal attacks at scale. We show an evaluation method for a classifier in terms of the aggregated number of crowd-workers it can approximate. We apply our methodology to English Wikipedia, generating a corpus of over 100k high quality human-labeled comments and 63M machine-labeled ones from a classifier that is as good as the aggregate of 3 crowd-workers, as measured by the area under the ROC curve and Spearman correlation. Using this corpus of machine-labeled scores, our methodology allows us to explore some of the open questions about the nature of online personal attacks. This reveals that the majority of personal attacks on Wikipedia are not the result of a few malicious users, nor primarily the consequence of allowing anonymous contributions from unregistered users.

Mind the GAP: A Balanced Corpus of Gendered Ambiguous Pronouns. Coreference resolution is an important task for natural language understanding, and the resolution of ambiguous pronouns a longstanding challenge. Nonetheless, existing corpora do not capture ambiguous pronouns in sufficient volume or diversity to accurately indicate the practical utility of models. Furthermore, we find gender bias in existing corpora and systems favoring masculine entities. To address this, we present and release GAP, a gender-balanced labeled corpus of 8,908 ambiguous pronoun-name pairs sampled to provide diverse coverage of challenges posed by real-world text. We explore a range of baselines which demonstrate the complexity of the challenge, the best achieving just 66.9% F1. We show that syntactic structure and continuous neural models provide promising, complementary cues for approaching the challenge.

Identifying and Reducing Gender Bias in Word-Level Language Models. Many text corpora exhibit socially problematic biases, which can be propagated or amplified in the models trained on such data. For example, doctor cooccurs more frequently with male pronouns than female pronouns. In this study we (i) propose a metric to measure gender bias; (ii) measure bias in a text corpus and the text generated from a recurrent neural network language model trained on the text corpus; (iii) propose a regularization loss term for the language model that minimizes the projection of encoder-trained embeddings onto an embedding subspace that encodes gender; (iv) finally, evaluate efficacy of our proposed method on reducing gender bias. We find this regularization method to be effective in reducing gender bias up to an optimal weight assigned to the loss term, beyond which the model becomes unstable as the perplexity increases. We replicate this study on three training corpora---Penn Treebank, WikiText-2, and CNN/Daily Mail---resulting in similar conclusions.

Long short-term memory. Learning to store information over extended time intervals by recurrent backpropagation takes a very long time, mostly because of insufficient, decaying error backflow. We briefly review Hochreiter's (1991) analysis of this problem, then address it by introducing a novel, efficient, gradient-based method called long short-term memory (LSTM). Truncating the gradient where this does not do harm, LSTM can learn to bridge minimal time lags in excess of 1000 discrete-time steps by enforcing constant error flow through constant error carousels within special units. Multiplicative gate units learn to open and close access to the constant error flow. LSTM is local in space and time; its computational complexity per time step and weight is O(1). Our experiments with artificial data involve local, distributed, real-valued, and noisy pattern representations. In comparisons with real-time recurrent learning, back propagation through time, recurrent cascade correlation, Elman nets, and neural sequence chunking, LSTM leads to many more successful runs, and learns much faster. LSTM also solves complex, artificial long-time-lag tasks that have never been solved by previous recurrent network algorithms.

Completely derandomized self-adaptation in evolution strategies. This paper puts forward two useful methods for self-adaptation of the mutation distribution - the concepts of derandomization and cumulation. Principle shortcomings of the concept of mutative strategy parameter control and two levels of derandomization are reviewed. Basic demands on the self-adaptation of arbitrary (normal) mutation distributions are developed. Applying arbitrary, normal mutation distributions is equivalent to applying a general, linear problem encoding. The underlying objective of mutative strategy parameter control is roughly to favor previously selected mutation steps in the future. If this objective is pursued rigorously, a completely derandomized self-adaptation scheme results, which adapts arbitrary normal mutation distributions. This scheme, called covariance matrix adaptation (CMA), meets the previously stated demands. It can still be considerably improved by cumulation - utilizing an evolution path rather than single search steps. Simulations on various test functions reveal local and global search properties of the evolution strategy with and without covariance matrix adaptation. Their performances are comparable only on perfectly scaled functions. On badly scaled, non-separable functions usually a speed up factor of several orders of magnitude is observed. On moderately mis-scaled functions a speed up factor of three to ten can be expected.

On the History of the Minimum Spanning Tree Problem It is standard practice among authors discussing the minimum spanning tree problem to refer to the work of Kruskal(1956) and Prim (1957) as the sources of the problem and its first efficient solutions, despite the citation by both of Boruvka (1926) as a predecessor. In fact, there are several apparently independent sources and algorithmic solutions of the problem. They have appeared in Czechoslovakia, France, and Poland, going back to the beginning of this century. We shall explore and compare these works and their motivations, and relate them to the most recent advances on the minimum spanning tree problem.

A robust adaptive nonlinear control design An adaptive control design procedure for a class of nonlinear systems with both parametric uncertainty and unknown nonlinearities is presented. The unknown nonlinearities lie within some 'bounding functions', which are assumed to be partially known. The key assumption is that the uncertain terms satisfy a 'triangularity condition'. As illustrated by examples, the proposed design procedure expands the class of nonlinear systems for which global adaptive stabilization methods can be applied. The overall adaptive scheme is shown to guarantee global uniform ultimate boundedness.

Internet of Things: A Survey on Enabling Technologies, Protocols and Applications This paper provides an overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) with emphasis on enabling technologies, protocols and application issues. The IoT is enabled by the latest developments in RFID, smart sensors, communication technologies and Internet protocols. The basic premise is to have smart sensors collaborate directly without human involvement to deliver a new class of applications. The current revolution in Internet, mobile and machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies can be seen as the first phase of the IoT. In the coming years, the IoT is expected to bridge diverse technologies to enable new applications by connecting physical objects together in support of intelligent decision making. This paper starts by providing a horizontal overview of the IoT. Then, we give an overview of some technical details that pertain to the IoT enabling technologies, protocols and applications. Compared to other survey papers in the field, our objective is to provide a more thorough summary of the most relevant protocols and application issues to enable researchers and application developers to get up to speed quickly on how the different protocols fit together to deliver desired functionalities without having to go through RFCs and the standards specifications. We also provide an overview of some of the key IoT challenges presented in the recent literature and provide a summary of related research work. Moreover, we explore the relation between the IoT and other emerging technologies including big data analytics and cloud and fog computing. We also present the need for better horizontal integration among IoT services. Finally, we present detailed service use-cases to illustrate how the different protocols presented in the paper fit together to deliver desired IoT services.

Multiple switching-time-dependent discretized Lyapunov functions/functionals methods for stability analysis of switched time-delay stochastic systems. This paper presents novel approaches for stability analysis of switched linear time-delay stochastic systems under dwell time constraint. Instead of using comparison principle, piecewise switching-time-dependent discretized Lyapunov functions/functionals are introduced to analyze the stability of switched stochastic systems with constant or time-varying delays. These Lyapunov functions/functionals are decreasing during the dwell time and non-increasing at switching instants, which lead to two mode-dependent dwell-time-based delay-independent stability criteria for the switched systems without restricting the stability of the subsystems. Comparison and numerical examples are provided to show the efficiency of the proposed results.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Adaptive Fuzzy Containment Control of Nonlinear Systems With Unmeasurable States. The adaptive fuzzy containment control problem is discussed for high-order systems with unknown nonlinear dynamics and unmeasurable states guided by multiple dynamic leaders. A high gain observer is introduced to reconstruct the system states. Then, utilizing fuzzy logic systems to model followers' dynamics, an observer-based adaptive fuzzy containment control approach is presented using only the relative position of the neighbors. It is shown that the uniformly ultimately bounded containment control is realized under the condition that, each follower can obtain the information from at least one leader through a directed path. As an extension, an observer-based containment control with prescribed performance is developed, which guarantees the relative position error to be bounded by a specified bound. The obtained theoretical results are validated by simulation examples.

Distributed Adaptive Fuzzy Containment Control of Stochastic Pure-Feedback Nonlinear Multiagent Systems With Local Quantized Controller and Tracking Constraint This paper studies the distributed adaptive fuzzy containment tracking control for a class of high-order stochastic pure-feedback nonlinear multiagent systems with multiple dynamic leaders and performance constraint requirement. The control inputs are quantized by hysteresis quantizers. Mean value theorems are used to transfer the nonaffine systems into affine forms and a nonlinear decomposition is employed to solve the quantized input control problem. With a novel structure barrier Lyapunov function, the distributed control strategy is developed. It is strictly proved that the outputs of the followers converge to the convex hull spanned by the multiple dynamic leaders, the containment tracking errors satisfy the performance constraint requirement and the resulting leader-following multiagent system is stable in probability based on Lyapunov stability theory. At last, simulation is provided to show the validity and the advantages of the proposed techniques.

Adaptive Fuzzy Containment Control for Multiple Uncertain Euler&#x2013;Lagrange Systems With an Event-Based Observer AbstractThis paper considers the containment control problem for multiple Euler–Lagrange systems with unknown nonlinear dynamics, where the dynamics of the leaders are different from those of the followers. In addition, some followers cannot obtain information of the leaders owing to the limited communication range. We first adopt an event-based observer to estimate a trajectory inside the convex hull spanned by states of the leaders, in which continuous communication can be avoided as well. Then, we further utilize the fuzzy logic systems to approximate the unknown nonlinear dynamics and propose an adaptive control scheme. Under the proposed scheme, we can ensure that the states of the followers can converge to the convex hull formed by these states of the leaders. Finally, a simulation example is given to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.

Fully distributed containment control of high-order multi-agent systems with nonlinear dynamics. In this paper, distributed containment control problems for high-order multi-agent systems with nonlinear dynamics are investigated under directed communication topology. The states of the leaders are only available to a subset of the followers and the inputs of the leaders are possibly nonzero and time varying. Distributed adaptive nonlinear protocol is proposed based only on the relative state information, under which the states of the followers converge to the dynamic convex hull spanned by those of the leaders. As the special case with only one dynamic leader, leader–follower consensus problem is also solved with the proposed protocol. The adaptive protocol here is independent of the eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix, which means the protocol can be implemented by each agent in a fully distributed fashion. A simulation example is provided to illustrate the theoretical results.

Fuzzy Adaptive Practical Fixed-Time Consensus for Second-Order Nonlinear Multiagent Systems Under Actuator Faults This article concentrates upon the problem of practical fixed-time consensus for second-order nonlinear multiagent systems (MASs) under directed communication topology. The convergence time is independent of the initial condition. Both loss of effectiveness and bias fault are taken into account. Meanwhile, fuzzy-logic systems are introduced to approximate the unknown nonlinear functions. By the adding-a-power-integrator method, a distributed fuzzy adaptive practical fixed-time fault-tolerant control scheme is proposed. Then, the leader can be tracked in a settling time, and the consensus tracking errors converge to an adjustable neighborhood of the origin. Finally, two simulations are given to further illustrate the effectiveness of the theoretical result.

Distributed Containment Maneuvering of Uncertain Multiagent Systems in MIMO Strict-Feedback Form This paper investigates the distributed containment maneuvering problem for uncertain nonlinear multiagent systems in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) strict-feedback form. The follower agents are driven to achieve a collective motion guided by multiple parameterized paths, and a dynamic behavior can be independently prescribed for the group during maneuvering. A containment maneuvering controller is developed by utilizing a modular design method enabling decoupled estimation and control. Specifically, an estimator module is constructed by utilizing an echo state network to identify the unknown nonlinearities. Next, a controller module is constructed by employing a modified dynamic surface control method where a second-order nonlinear tracking differentiator is introduced to extract the derivative information of the virtual control law. Subsequently, a path update law is derived such that the virtual leaders are synchronized, and the desired speed profile for the group can be specified independently. By using a small-gain theorem and cascade stability theory, the entire closed-loop system is proved to be input-to-state stable, and the containment maneuvering errors are uniformly ultimately bounded. An application for the formation control of marine surface vehicles is provided to show the efficacy of the proposed controller for containment maneuvering of uncertain nonlinear MIMO strict-feedback systems.

Containment control of heterogeneous linear multi-agent systems In this note, we study the containment control problem of heterogeneous linear multi-agent systems based on output regulation framework. Motivated by leader-follower output regulation problems, the leaders are assumed to be exosystems. In controller design approach for each follower, we utilize a distributed dynamic state feedback control scheme. To achieve the objective of this work, we modify the conventional output regulation error in such a way that it can handle more than one leader, and we also introduce a dynamic compensator. Our work is based on a new formulation for containment error that guarantees the convergence of all follower agents to the dynamic convex hull spanned by the leaders, and also enables us to use output regulation techniques with some modifications to solve the containment problem. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the validity of theoretical results.

Adaptive dynamic programming for finite-horizon optimal control of discrete-time nonlinear systems with ε-error bound. In this paper, we study the finite-horizon optimal control problem for discrete-time nonlinear systems using the adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) approach. The idea is to use an iterative ADP algorithm to obtain the optimal control law which makes the performance index function close to the greatest lower bound of all performance indices within an ε-error bound. The optimal number of control steps can also be obtained by the proposed ADP algorithms. A convergence analysis of the proposed ADP algorithms in terms of performance index function and control policy is made. In order to facilitate the implementation of the iterative ADP algorithms, neural networks are used for approximating the performance index function, computing the optimal control policy, and modeling the nonlinear system. Finally, two simulation examples are employed to illustrate the applicability of the proposed method.

Bidirectional recurrent neural networks In the first part of this paper, a regular recurrent neural network (RNN) is extended to a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN). The BRNN can be trained without the limitation of using input information just up to a preset future frame. This is accomplished by training it simultaneously in positive and negative time direction. Structure and training procedure of the proposed network are explained. In regression and classification experiments on artificial data, the proposed structure gives better results than other approaches. For real data, classification experiments for phonemes from the TIMIT database show the same tendency. In the second part of this paper, it is shown how the proposed bidirectional structure can be easily modified to allow efficient estimation of the conditional posterior probability of complete symbol sequences without making any explicit assumption about the shape of the distribution. For this part, experiments on real data are reported

Touring a sequence of polygons Given a sequence of k polygons in the plane, a start point s, and a target point, t, we seek a shortest path that starts at s, visits in order each of the polygons, and ends at t. If the polygons are disjoint and convex, we give an algorithm running in time O(kn log (n/k)), where n is the total number of vertices specifying the polygons. We also extend our results to a case in which the convex polygons are arbitrarily intersecting and the subpath between any two consecutive polygons is constrained to lie within a simply connected region; the algorithm uses O(nk2 log n) time. Our methods are simple and allow shortest path queries from s to a query point t to be answered in time O(k log n + m), where m is the combinatorial path length. We show that for nonconvex polygons this "touring polygons" problem is NP-hard.The touring polygons problem is a strict generalization of some classic problems in computational geometry, including the safari problem, the zoo-keeper problem, and the watchman route problem in a simple polygon. Our new results give an order of magnitude improvement in the running times of the safari problem and the watchman route problem: We solve the safari problem in O(n2 log n) time and the watchman route problem (through a fixed point s) in time O(n3 log n), compared with the previous time bounds of O(n3) and O(n4), respectively.

A Nonconservative LMI Condition for Stability of Switched Systems With Guaranteed Dwell Time. Ensuring stability of switched linear systems with a guaranteed dwell time is an important problem in control systems. Several methods have been proposed in the literature to address this problem, but unfortunately they provide sufficient conditions only. This technical note proposes the use of homogeneous polynomial Lyapunov functions in the non-restrictive case where all the subsystems are Hurwitz, showing that a sufficient condition can be provided in terms of an LMI feasibility test by exploiting a key representation of polynomials. Several properties are proved for this condition, in particular that it is also necessary for a sufficiently large degree of these functions. As a result, the proposed condition provides a sequence of upper bounds of the minimum dwell time that approximate it arbitrarily well. Some examples illustrate the proposed approach.

A recent survey of reversible watermarking techniques. The art of secretly hiding and communicating information has gained immense importance in the last two decades due to the advances in generation, storage, and communication technology of digital content. Watermarking is one of the promising solutions for tamper detection and protection of digital content. However, watermarking can cause damage to the sensitive information present in the cover work. Therefore, at the receiving end, the exact recovery of cover work may not be possible. Additionally, there exist certain applications that may not tolerate even small distortions in cover work prior to the downstream processing. In such applications, reversible watermarking instead of conventional watermarking is employed. Reversible watermarking of digital content allows full extraction of the watermark along with the complete restoration of the cover work. For the last few years, reversible watermarking techniques are gaining popularity because of its increasing applications in some important and sensitive areas, i.e., military communication, healthcare, and law-enforcement. Due to the rapid evolution of reversible watermarking techniques, a latest review of recent research in this field is highly desirable. In this survey, the performances of different reversible watermarking schemes are discussed on the basis of various characteristics of watermarking. However, the major focus of this survey is on prediction-error expansion based reversible watermarking techniques, whereby the secret information is hidden in the prediction domain through error expansion. Comparison of the different reversible watermarking techniques is provided in tabular form, and an analysis is carried out. Additionally, experimental comparison of some of the recent reversible watermarking techniques, both in terms of watermarking properties and computational time, is provided on a dataset of 300 images. Future directions are also provided for this potentially important field of watermarking.

Design of robust fuzzy fault detection filter for polynomial fuzzy systems with new finite frequency specifications This paper investigates the problem of fault detection filter design for discrete-time polynomial fuzzy systems with faults and unknown disturbances. The frequency ranges of the faults and the disturbances are assumed to be known beforehand and to reside in low, middle or high frequency ranges. Thus, the proposed filter is designed in the finite frequency range to overcome the conservatism generated by those designed in the full frequency domain. Being of polynomial fuzzy structure, the proposed filter combines the H−/H∞ performances in order to ensure the best robustness to the disturbance and the best sensitivity to the fault. Design conditions are derived in Sum Of Squares formulations that can be easily solved via available software tools. Two illustrative examples are introduced to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and a comparative study with LMI method is also provided.

Hardware Circuits Design and Performance Evaluation of a Soft Lower Limb Exoskeleton Soft lower limb exoskeletons (LLEs) are wearable devices that have good potential in walking rehabilitation and augmentation. While a few studies focused on the structure design and assistance force optimization of the soft LLEs, rarely work has been conducted on the hardware circuits design. The main purpose of this work is to present a new soft LLE for walking efficiency improvement and introduce its hardware circuits design. A soft LLE for hip flexion assistance and a hardware circuits system with scalability were proposed. To assess the efficacy of the soft LLE, the experimental tests that evaluate the sensor data acquisition, force tracking performance, lower limb muscle activity and metabolic cost were conducted. The time error in the peak assistance force was just 1%. The reduction in the normalized root-mean-square EMG of the rectus femoris was 7.1%. The net metabolic cost in exoskeleton on condition was reduced by 7.8% relative to walking with no exoskeleton. The results show that the designed hardware circuits can be applied to the soft LLE and the soft LLE is able to improve walking efficiency of wearers.

Intelligent network data analytics function in 5G cellular networks using machine learning 5G cellular networks come with many new features compared to the legacy cellular networks, such as network data analytics function (NWDAF), which enables the network operators to either implement their own machine learning (ML) based data analytics methodologies or integrate third-party solutions to their networks. In this paper, the structure and the protocols of NWDAF that are defined in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standard documents are first described. Then, cell-based synthetic data set for 5G networks based on the fields defined by the 3GPP specifications is generated. Further, some anomalies are added to this data set (e.g., suddenly increasing traffic in a particular cell), and then these anomalies within each cell, subscriber category, and user equipment are classified. Afterward, three ML models, namely, linear regression, long-short term memory, and recursive neural networks are implemented to study behaviour information estimation (e.g., anomalies in the network traffic) and network load prediction capabilities of NWDAF. For the prediction of network load, three different models are used to minimize the mean absolute error, which is calculated by subtracting the actual generated data from the model prediction value. For the classification of anomalies, two ML models are used to increase the area under the receiver operating characteristics curve, namely, logistic regression and extreme gradient boosting. According to the simulation results, neural network algorithms outperform linear regression in network load prediction, whereas the tree-based gradient boosting algorithm outperforms logistic regression in anomaly detection. These estimations are expected to increase the performance of the 5G network through NWDAF.

Network anomaly detection using IP flows with Principal Component Analysis and Ant Colony Optimization. It is remarkable how proactive network management is in such demand nowadays, since networks are growing in size and complexity and Information Technology services cannot be stopped. In this manner, it is necessary to use an approach which proactively identifies traffic behavior patterns which may harm the network's normal operations. Aiming an automated management to detect and prevent potential problems, we present and compare two novel anomaly detection mechanisms based on statistical procedure Principal Component Analysis and the Ant Colony Optimization metaheuristic. These methods generate a traffic profile, called Digital Signature of Network Segment using Flow analysis (DSNSF), which is adopted as normal network behavior. Then, this signature is compared with the real network traffic by using a modification of the Dynamic Time Warping metric in order to recognize anomalous events. Thus, a seven-dimensional analysis of IP flows is performed, allowing the characterization of bits, packets and flows traffic transmitted per second, and the extraction of descriptive flow attributes, like source IP address, destination IP address, source TCP/UDP port and destination TCP/UDP port. The systems were evaluated using a real network environment and showed promising results. Moreover, the correspondence between true-positive and false-positive rates demonstrates that the systems are able to enhance the detection of anomalous behavior by maintaining a satisfactory false-alarm rate. Display Omitted Anomaly detection issue is addressed based on network traffic profiling.Proposal and comparison of detection methods belonging to distinct algorithm classes.Detection mechanism constructed over an adaptation of a pattern matching technique.Use of real and simulated traffic to evaluate the proposed methods.Traffic patterns that may harm the network operations are proactively identified.

A multi-step outlier-based anomaly detection approach to network-wide traffic. We propose a multi-step outlier-based anomaly detection approach to network-wide traffic.We propose a feature selection algorithm to select relevant non-redundant subset of features.We propose a tree-based clustering algorithm to generate non-redundant overlapped clusters.We introduce an efficient score-based outlier estimation technique to detect anomalies in network-wide traffic.We establish a fast distributed feature extraction framework to extract significant features from raw network-wide traffic.We conduct extensive experiments using the proposed algorithms with synthetic and real-life network-wide traffic datasets. Outlier detection is of considerable interest in fields such as physical sciences, medical diagnosis, surveillance detection, fraud detection and network anomaly detection. The data mining and network management research communities are interested in improving existing score-based network traffic anomaly detection techniques because of ample scopes to increase performance. In this paper, we present a multi-step outlier-based approach for detection of anomalies in network-wide traffic. We identify a subset of relevant traffic features and use it during clustering and anomaly detection. To support outlier-based network anomaly identification, we use the following modules: a mutual information and generalized entropy based feature selection technique to select a relevant non-redundant subset of features, a tree-based clustering technique to generate a set of reference points and an outlier score function to rank incoming network traffic to identify anomalies. We also design a fast distributed feature extraction and data preparation framework to extract features from raw network-wide traffic. We evaluate our approach in terms of detection rate, false positive rate, precision, recall and F-measure using several high dimensional synthetic and real-world datasets and find the performance superior in comparison to competing algorithms.

FLaaS: Federated Learning as a Service ABSTRACTFederated Learning (FL) is emerging as a promising technology to build machine learning models in a decentralized, privacy-preserving fashion. Indeed, FL enables local training on user devices, avoiding user data to be transferred to centralized servers, and can be enhanced with differential privacy mechanisms. Although FL has been recently deployed in real systems, the possibility of collaborative modeling across different 3rd-party applications has not yet been explored. In this paper, we tackle this problem and present Federated Learning as a Service (FLaaS), a system enabling different scenarios of 3rd-party application collaborative model building and addressing the consequent challenges of permission and privacy management, usability, and hierarchical model training. FLaaS can be deployed in different operational environments. As a proof of concept, we implement it on a mobile phone setting and discuss practical implications of results on simulated and real devices with respect to on-device training CPU cost, memory footprint and power consumed per FL model round. Therefore, we demonstrate FLaaS's feasibility in building unique or joint FL models across applications for image object detection in a few hours, across 100 devices.

A Distributed NWDAF Architecture for Federated Learning in 5G For network automation and intelligence in 5G, the network data analytics function (NWDAF) has been introduced as a new network function. However, the existing centralized NWDAF structure can be overloaded if an amount of analytic data are concentrated. In this paper, we introduce a distributed NWDAF structure tailored for federated learning (FL) in 5G. Leaf NWDAFs create local models and root NWD...

Footprints: history-rich tools for information foraging Inspired by Hill and Hollans original work [7], we have beendeveloping a theory of interaction history and building tools toapply this theory to navigation in a complex information space. Wehave built a series of tools - map, paths, annota- tions andsignposts - based on a physical-world navigation metaphor. Thesetools have been in use for over a year. Our user study involved acontrolled browse task and showed that users were able to get thesame amount of work done with significantly less effort.

A Low-Complexity Analytical Modeling for Cross-Layer Adaptive Error Protection in Video Over WLAN We find a low-complicity and accurate model to solve the problem of optimizing MAC-layer transmission of real-time video over wireless local area networks (WLANs) using cross-layer techniques. The objective in this problem is to obtain the optimal MAC retry limit in order to minimize the total packet loss rate. First, the accuracy of Fluid and M/M/1/K analytical models is examined. Then we derive a closed-form expression for service time in WLAN MAC transmission, and will use this in mathematical formulation of our optimization problem based on M/G/1 model. Subsequently we introduce an approximate and simple formula for MAC-layer service time, which leads to the M/M/1 model. Compared with M/G/1, we particularly show that our M/M/1-based model provides a low-complexity and yet quite accurate means for analyzing MAC transmission process in WLAN. Using our M/M/1 model-based analysis, we derive closed-form formulas for the packet overflow drop rate and optimum retry-limit. These closed-form expressions can be effectively invoked for analyzing adaptive retry-limit algorithms. Simulation results (network simulator-2) will verify the accuracy of our analytical models.

Semantic Image Synthesis With Spatially-Adaptive Normalization We propose spatially-adaptive normalization, a simple but effective layer for synthesizing photorealistic images given an input semantic layout. Previous methods directly feed the semantic layout as input to the deep network, which is then processed through stacks of convolution, normalization, and nonlinearity layers. We show that this is suboptimal as the normalization layers tend to "wash away" semantic information. To address the issue, we propose using the input layout. for modulating the activations in normalization layers through a spatially-adaptive,learned transformation. Experiments on several challenging datasets demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method over existing approaches, regarding both visual fidelity and align-ment with input layouts. Finally, our model allows user control over both semantic and style as synthesizing images.

Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults The problem addressed here concerns a set of isolated processors, some unknown subset of which may be faulty, that communicate only by means of two-party messages. Each nonfaulty processor has a private value of information that must be communicated to each other nonfaulty processor. Nonfaulty processors always communicate honestly, whereas faulty processors may lie. The problem is to devise an algorithm in which processors communicate their own values and relay values received from others that allows each nonfaulty processor to infer a value for each other processor. The value inferred for a nonfaulty processor must be that processor's private value, and the value inferred for a faulty one must be consistent with the corresponding value inferred by each other nonfaulty processor.It is shown that the problem is solvable for, and only for, n ≥ 3m + 1, where m is the number of faulty processors and n is the total number. It is also shown that if faulty processors can refuse to pass on information but cannot falsely relay information, the problem is solvable for arbitrary n ≥ m ≥ 0. This weaker assumption can be approximated in practice using cryptographic methods.

Reservoir computing approaches to recurrent neural network training Echo State Networks and Liquid State Machines introduced a new paradigm in artificial recurrent neural network (RNN) training, where an RNN (the reservoir) is generated randomly and only a readout is trained. The paradigm, becoming known as reservoir computing, greatly facilitated the practical application of RNNs and outperformed classical fully trained RNNs in many tasks. It has lately become a vivid research field with numerous extensions of the basic idea, including reservoir adaptation, thus broadening the initial paradigm to using different methods for training the reservoir and the readout. This review systematically surveys both current ways of generating/adapting the reservoirs and training different types of readouts. It offers a natural conceptual classification of the techniques, which transcends boundaries of the current “brand-names” of reservoir methods, and thus aims to help in unifying the field and providing the reader with a detailed “map” of it.

Implementing Vehicle Routing Algorithms

Finite-approximation-error-based discrete-time iterative adaptive dynamic programming. In this paper, a new iterative adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) algorithm is developed to solve optimal control problems for infinite horizon discrete-time nonlinear systems with finite approximation errors. First, a new generalized value iteration algorithm of ADP is developed to make the iterative performance index function converge to the solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation. The ...

An evolutionary programming approach for securing medical images using watermarking scheme in invariant discrete wavelet transformation. •The proposed watermarking scheme utilized improved discrete wavelet transformation (IDWT) to retrieve the invariant wavelet domain.•The entropy mechanism is used to identify the suitable region for insertion of watermark. This will improve the imperceptibility and robustness of the watermarking procedure.•The scaling factors such as PSNR and NC are considered for evaluation of the proposed method and the Particle Swarm Optimization is employed to optimize the scaling factors.

A Hierarchical Architecture Using Biased Min-Consensus for USV Path Planning This paper proposes a hierarchical architecture using the biased min-consensus (BMC) method, to solve the path planning problem of unmanned surface vessel (USV). We take the fixed-point monitoring mission as an example, where a series of intermediate monitoring points should be visited once by USV. The whole framework incorporates the low-level layer planning the standard path between any two intermediate points, and the high-level fashion determining their visiting sequence. First, the optimal standard path in terms of voyage time and risk measure is planned by the BMC protocol, given that the corresponding graph is constructed with node state and edge weight. The USV will avoid obstacles or keep a certain distance safely, and arrive at the target point quickly. It is proven theoretically that the state of the graph will converge to be stable after finite iterations, i.e., the optimal solution can be found by BMC with low calculation complexity. Second, by incorporating the constraint of intermediate points, their visiting sequence is optimized by BMC again with the reconstruction of a new virtual graph based on the former planned results. The extensive simulation results in various scenarios also validate the feasibility and effectiveness of our method for autonomous navigation.

Learning Drivers’ Behavior to Improve Adaptive Cruise Control Traditionally, vehicles have been considered as machines that are controlled by humans for the purpose of transportation. A more modern view is to envision drivers and passengers as actively interacting with a complex automated system. Such interactive activity leads us to consider intelligent and advanced ways of interaction leading to cars that can adapt to their drivers. In this article, we focus on the adaptive cruise control (ACC) technology that allows a vehicle to automatically adjust its speed to maintain a preset distance from the vehicle in front of it based on the driver’s preferences. Although individual drivers have different driving styles and preferences, current systems do not distinguish among users. We introduce an approach to combine machine learning algorithms with demographic information and behavioral driver models into existing automated assistive systems. This approach can reduce the interactions between drivers and automated systems by adjusting parameters relevant to the operation of these systems based on their specific drivers and context of drive. We also learn when users tend to engage and disengage the automated system. This approach sheds light on the kinds of dynamics that users develop while interacting with automation and can teach us how to improve these systems for the benefit of their users. While generic packages such as Weka were successful in learning drivers’ behavior exclusively based on the ACC’s sensors, we found that improved learning models could be developed by adding information on drivers’ demographics and a previously developed model about different driver types. We present the general methodology of our learning procedure and suggest applications of our approach to other domains as well.

Analysing user physiological responses for affective video summarisation. Video summarisation techniques aim to abstract the most significant content from a video stream. This is typically achieved by processing low-level image, audio and text features which are still quite disparate from the high-level semantics that end users identify with (the ‘semantic gap’). Physiological responses are potentially rich indicators of memorable or emotionally engaging video content for a given user. Consequently, we investigate whether they may serve as a suitable basis for a video summarisation technique by analysing a range of user physiological response measures, specifically electro-dermal response (EDR), respiration amplitude (RA), respiration rate (RR), blood volume pulse (BVP) and heart rate (HR), in response to a range of video content in a variety of genres including horror, comedy, drama, sci-fi and action. We present an analysis framework for processing the user responses to specific sub-segments within a video stream based on percent rank value normalisation. The application of the analysis framework reveals that users respond significantly to the most entertaining video sub-segments in a range of content domains. Specifically, horror content seems to elicit significant EDR, RA, RR and BVP responses, and comedy content elicits comparatively lower levels of EDR, but does seem to elicit significant RA, RR, BVP and HR responses. Drama content seems to elicit less significant physiological responses in general, and both sci-fi and action content seem to elicit significant EDR responses. We discuss the implications this may have for future affective video summarisation approaches.

On the roles of eye gaze and head dynamics in predicting driver's intent to change lanes Driver behavioral cues may present a rich source of information and feedback for future intelligent advanced driver-assistance systems (ADASs). With the design of a simple and robust ADAS in mind, we are interested in determining the most important driver cues for distinguishing driver intent. Eye gaze may provide a more accurate proxy than head movement for determining driver attention, whereas the measurement of head motion is less cumbersome and more reliable in harsh driving conditions. We use a lane-change intent-prediction system (McCall et al., 2007) to determine the relative usefulness of each cue for determining intent. Various combinations of input data are presented to a discriminative classifier, which is trained to output a prediction of probable lane-change maneuver at a particular point in the future. Quantitative results from a naturalistic driving study are presented and show that head motion, when combined with lane position and vehicle dynamics, is a reliable cue for lane-change intent prediction. The addition of eye gaze does not improve performance as much as simpler head dynamics cues. The advantage of head data over eye data is shown to be statistically significant (p

Detection of Driver Fatigue Caused by Sleep Deprivation This paper aims to provide reliable indications of driver drowsiness based on the characteristics of driver-vehicle interaction. A test bed was built under a simulated driving environment, and a total of 12 subjects participated in two experiment sessions requiring different levels of sleep (partial sleep-deprivation versus no sleep-deprivation) before the experiment. The performance of the subjects was analyzed in a series of stimulus-response and routine driving tasks, which revealed the performance differences of drivers under different sleep-deprivation levels. The experiments further demonstrated that sleep deprivation had greater effect on rule-based than on skill-based cognitive functions: when drivers were sleep-deprived, their performance of responding to unexpected disturbances degraded, while they were robust enough to continue the routine driving tasks such as lane tracking, vehicle following, and lane changing. In addition, we presented both qualitative and quantitative guidelines for designing drowsy-driver detection systems in a probabilistic framework based on the paradigm of Bayesian networks. Temporal aspects of drowsiness and individual differences of subjects were addressed in the framework.

Online Prediction of Driver Distraction Based on Brain Activity Patterns This paper presents a new computational framework for early detection of driver distractions (map viewing) using brain activity measured by electroencephalographic (EEG) signals. Compared with most studies in the literature, which are mainly focused on the classification of distracted and nondistracted periods, this study proposes a new framework to prospectively predict the start and end of a distraction period, defined by map viewing. The proposed prediction algorithm was tested on a data set of continuous EEG signals recorded from 24 subjects. During the EEG recordings, the subjects were asked to drive from an initial position to a destination using a city map in a simulated driving environment. The overall accuracy values for the prediction of the start and the end of map viewing were 81% and 70%, respectively. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm can predict the start and end of map viewing with relatively high accuracy and can be generalized to individual subjects. The outcome of this study has a high potential to improve the design of future intelligent navigation systems. Prediction of the start of map viewing can be used to provide route information based on a driver's needs and consequently avoid map-viewing activities. Prediction of the end of map viewing can be used to provide warnings for potential long map-viewing durations. Further development of the proposed framework and its applications in driver-distraction predictions are also discussed.

A Forward Collision Warning Algorithm With Adaptation to Driver Behaviors. Significant effort has been made on designing user-acceptable driver assistance systems. To adapt to driver characteristics, this paper proposes a forward collision warning (FCW) algorithm that can adjust its warning thresholds in a real-time manner according to driver behavior changes, including both behavioral fluctuation and individual difference. This adaptive FCW algorithm overcomes the limit...

A CRNN module for hand pose estimation. •The input is no longer a single frame, but a sequence of several adjacent frames.•A CRNN module is proposed, which is basically the same as the standard RNN, except that it uses convolutional connection.•When the difference in the feature image of a certain layer is large, it is better to add CRNN / RNN after this layer.•Our method has the lowest error of output compared to the current state-of-the-art methods.

Deep convolutional neural network-based Bernoulli heatmap for head pose estimation Head pose estimation is a crucial problem for many tasks, such as driver attention, fatigue detection, and human behaviour analysis. It is well known that neural networks are better at handling classification problems than regression problems. It is an extremely nonlinear process to let the network output the angle value directly for optimization learning, and the weight constraint of the loss function will be relatively weak. This paper proposes a novel Bernoulli heatmap for head pose estimation from a single RGB image. Our method can achieve the positioning of the head area while estimating the angles of the head. The Bernoulli heatmap makes it possible to construct fully convolutional neural networks without fully connected layers and provides a new idea for the output form of head pose estimation. A deep convolutional neural network (CNN) structure with multiscale representations is adopted to maintain high-resolution information and low-resolution information in parallel. This kind of structure can maintain rich, high-resolution representations. In addition, channelwise fusion is adopted to make the fusion weights learnable instead of simple addition with equal weights. As a result, the estimation is spatially more precise and potentially more accurate. The effectiveness of the proposed method is empirically demonstrated by comparing it with other state-of-the-art methods on public datasets.

Reinforcement learning based data fusion method for multi-sensors In order to improve detection system robustness and reliability, multi-sensors fusion is used in modern air combat. In this paper, a data fusion method based on reinforcement learning is developed for multi-sensors. Initially, the cubic B-spline interpolation is used to solve time alignment problems of multisource data. Then, the reinforcement learning based data fusion (RLBDF) method is proposed to obtain the fusion results. With the case that the priori knowledge of target is obtained, the fusion accuracy reinforcement is realized by the error between fused value and actual value. Furthermore, the Fisher information is instead used as the reward if the priori knowledge is unable to be obtained. Simulations results verify that the developed method is feasible and effective for the multi-sensors data fusion in air combat.

Mobile Edge Computing Enabled 5G Health Monitoring for Internet of Medical Things: A Decentralized Game Theoretic Approach The prompt evolution of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) promotes pervasive in-home health monitoring networks. However, excessive requirements of patients result in insufficient spectrum resources and communication overload. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) enabled 5G health monitoring is conceived as a favorable paradigm to tackle such an obstacle. In this paper, we construct a cost-efficient in-home health monitoring system for IoMT by dividing it into two sub-networks, i.e., intra-Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) and beyond-WBANs. Highlighting the characteristics of IoMT, the cost of patients depends on medical criticality, Age of Information (AoI) and energy consumption. For intra-WBANs, a cooperative game is formulated to allocate the wireless channel resources. While for beyond-WBANs, considering the individual rationality and potential selfishness, a decentralized non-cooperative game is proposed to minimize the system-wide cost in IoMT. We prove that the proposed algorithm can reach a Nash equilibrium. In addition, the upper bound of the algorithm time complexity and the number of patients benefiting from MEC is theoretically derived. Performance evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm with respect to the system-wide cost and the number of patients benefiting from MEC.

Artificial fish swarm algorithm: a survey of the state-of-the-art, hybridization, combinatorial and indicative applications FSA (artificial fish-swarm algorithm) is one of the best methods of optimization among the swarm intelligence algorithms. This algorithm is inspired by the collective movement of the fish and their various social behaviors. Based on a series of instinctive behaviors, the fish always try to maintain their colonies and accordingly demonstrate intelligent behaviors. Searching for food, immigration and dealing with dangers all happen in a social form and interactions between all fish in a group will result in an intelligent social behavior.This algorithm has many advantages including high convergence speed, flexibility, fault tolerance and high accuracy. This paper is a review of AFSA algorithm and describes the evolution of this algorithm along with all improvements, its combination with various methods as well as its applications. There are many optimization methods which have a affinity with this method and the result of this combination will improve the performance of this method. Its disadvantages include high time complexity, lack of balance between global and local search, in addition to lack of benefiting from the experiences of group members for the next movements.

Short-Term Traffic Flow Forecasting: An Experimental Comparison of Time-Series Analysis and Supervised Learning The literature on short-term traffic flow forecasting has undergone great development recently. Many works, describing a wide variety of different approaches, which very often share similar features and ideas, have been published. However, publications presenting new prediction algorithms usually employ different settings, data sets, and performance measurements, making it difficult to infer a clear picture of the advantages and limitations of each model. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we review existing approaches to short-term traffic flow forecasting methods under the common view of probabilistic graphical models, presenting an extensive experimental comparison, which proposes a common baseline for their performance analysis and provides the infrastructure to operate on a publicly available data set. Second, we present two new support vector regression models, which are specifically devised to benefit from typical traffic flow seasonality and are shown to represent an interesting compromise between prediction accuracy and computational efficiency. The SARIMA model coupled with a Kalman filter is the most accurate model; however, the proposed seasonal support vector regressor turns out to be highly competitive when performing forecasts during the most congested periods.

TSCA: A Temporal-Spatial Real-Time Charging Scheduling Algorithm for On-Demand Architecture in Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks. The collaborative charging issue in Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks (WRSNs) is a popular research problem. With the help of wireless power transfer technology, electrical energy can be transferred from wireless charging vehicles (WCVs) to sensors, providing a new paradigm to prolong network lifetime. Existing techniques on collaborative charging usually take the periodical and deterministic approach, but neglect influences of non-deterministic factors such as topological changes and node failures, making them unsuitable for large-scale WRSNs. In this paper, we develop a temporal-spatial charging scheduling algorithm, namely TSCA, for the on-demand charging architecture. We aim to minimize the number of dead nodes while maximizing energy efficiency to prolong network lifetime. First, after gathering charging requests, a WCV will compute a feasible movement solution. A basic path planning algorithm is then introduced to adjust the charging order for better efficiency. Furthermore, optimizations are made in a global level. Then, a node deletion algorithm is developed to remove low efficient charging nodes. Lastly, a node insertion algorithm is executed to avoid the death of abandoned nodes. Extensive simulations show that, compared with state-of-the-art charging scheduling algorithms, our scheme can achieve promising performance in charging throughput, charging efficiency, and other performance metrics.

A novel adaptive dynamic programming based on tracking error for nonlinear discrete-time systems In this paper, to eliminate the tracking error by using adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) algorithms, a novel formulation of the value function is presented for the optimal tracking problem (TP) of nonlinear discrete-time systems. Unlike existing ADP methods, this formulation introduces the control input into the tracking error, and ignores the quadratic form of the control input directly, which makes the boundedness and convergence of the value function independent of the discount factor. Based on the proposed value function, the optimal control policy can be deduced without considering the reference control input. Value iteration (VI) and policy iteration (PI) methods are applied to prove the optimality of the obtained control policy, and derived the monotonicity property and convergence of the iterative value function. Simulation examples realized with neural networks and the actor–critic structure are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed ADP algorithm.

Prominent unicast routing protocols for Mobile Ad hoc Networks: Criterion, classification, and key attributes. Mobile Ad hoc Networks are decentralized networks in which participating nodes are mobile, small form-factor, equipped with the wireless interface, and have forwarding capabilities. These self-organized networks extend limited wireless range by the provision of multi-hop arrangements on the fly without any central administrator. In order to facilitate communication in a dynamic multi-hop wireless environment, routing protocols are essential to discover routes between nodes that are arbitrarily located and can move dynamically. Routing protocols are intended to discover the correct and efficient route in a timely manner so that information could be delivered to the desired destination node. Routing protocols are the backbone of the Mobile Ad hoc Networks and are challenging to design. Several works have been proposed on routing, and systematic representation of these proposals is desirable. In this paper, we provide a survey of the wide range of routing proposals in the last twenty years for the mobile ad hoc network. We device many categories and classification criteria untouched in most of the surveys. This survey paper gives a key overview of the protocols, also classifies and arranges the routing protocols for logical illustration. Protocol classification in the paper assists to systematically access a large set of protocols and highlights the research trends in the domain.

M-LionWhale: multi-objective optimisation model for secure routing in mobile ad-hoc network. Mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is an emerging technology that comes under the category of wireless network. Even though the network assumes that all its mobile nodes are trusted, it is impossible in the real world as few nodes may be malicious. Therefore, it is essential to put forward a mechanism that can provide security by selecting an optimal route for data forwarding. In this study, a goal pro...

MOSOA: A new multi-objective seagull optimization algorithm •A novel Multi-objective Seagull Optimization Algorithm is proposed.•The algorithm is tested on 24 real challenging benchmark test function.•The results show the superior convergence behaviour of proposed algorithm.•The results on engineering design problems prove its efficiency and applicability.

Quality Of Service Based Ad Hoc On-Demand Multipath Distance Vector Routing Protocol In Mobile Ad Hoc Network Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are wireless networks that include many peer nodes. The node mobility in the MANETs leads to several issues like maintenance of paths, lifespan of the battery, safety, reliability and unpredictable link traits. All these in turn would adversely affect the network Quality of Service (QoS). In MANETs, a major role is played by the routing protocol for discovering as well as maintaining the paths. There are two types of routing: uni-path and multi-path. The MANET network can be made more reliable using the multipath routing protocol. The focus of this research is evaluating the multipath routing protocol for QoS. For better delivering of data, the Ad hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV) has improved methods. This maintains the QoS in terms of factors like MANET end-to-end delay, hop count and bandwidth. This work explores the evolutionary computation schemes for optimizing the routing. The discovery of QoS route in multi-constrained network is a complex problem, this is solved optimally using heuristic algorithms. In that, specifically used for intrusion detection programs in such challenging set ups would be Grammatical Evolution (GE). For finding out familiar threats in MANETs, the natural evolution-motivated GE scheme has been applied. The outcomes have shown that in MANETs, the proposed AOMDV-QoS schemes fulfill the Quality of Service requirements along with lesser delay and high reliability.

Energy-efficient and balanced routing in low-power wireless sensor networks for data collection Cost-based routing protocols are the main approach used in practical wireless sensor network (WSN) and Internet of Things (IoT) deployments for data collection applications with energy constraints; however, those routing protocols lead to the concentration of most of the data traffic on some specific nodes which provide the best available routes, thus significantly increasing their energy consumption. Consequently, nodes providing the best routes are potentially the first ones to deplete their batteries and stop working. In this paper, we introduce a novel routing strategy for energy efficient and balanced data collection in WSNs/IoT, which can be applied to any cost-based routing solution to exploit suboptimal network routing alternatives based on the parent set concept. While still taking advantage of the stable routing topologies built in cost-based routing protocols, our approach adds a random component into the process of packet forwarding to achieve a better network lifetime in WSNs. We evaluate the implementation of our approach against other state-of-the-art WSN routing protocols through thorough real-world testbed experiments and simulations, and demonstrate that our approach achieves a significant reduction in the energy consumption of the routing layer in the busiest nodes ranging from 11% to 59%, while maintaining over 99% reliability. Furthermore, we conduct the field deployment of our approach in a heterogeneous WSN for environmental monitoring in a forest area, report the experimental results and illustrate the effectiveness of our approach in detail. Our EER based routing protocol CTP+EER is made available as open source to the community for evaluation and adoption.

Computational thinking Summary form only given. My vision for the 21st century, Computational Thinking, will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

JPEG Error Analysis and Its Applications to Digital Image Forensics JPEG is one of the most extensively used image formats. Understanding the inherent characteristics of JPEG may play a useful role in digital image forensics. In this paper, we introduce JPEG error analysis to the study of image forensics. The main errors of JPEG include quantization, rounding, and truncation errors. Through theoretically analyzing the effects of these errors on single and double JPEG compression, we have developed three novel schemes for image forensics including identifying whether a bitmap image has previously been JPEG compressed, estimating the quantization steps of a JPEG image, and detecting the quantization table of a JPEG image. Extensive experimental results show that our new methods significantly outperform existing techniques especially for the images of small sizes. We also show that the new method can reliably detect JPEG image blocks which are as small as 8 × 8 pixels and compressed with quality factors as high as 98. This performance is important for analyzing and locating small tampered regions within a composite image.

Highly dynamic Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector routing (DSDV) for mobile computers An ad-hoc network is the cooperative engagement of a collection of Mobile Hosts without the required intervention of any centralized Access Point. In this paper we present an innovative design for the operation of such ad-hoc networks. The basic idea of the design is to operate each Mobile Host as a specialized router, which periodically advertises its view of the interconnection topology with other Mobile Hosts within the network. This amounts to a new sort of routing protocol. We have investigated modifications to the basic Bellman-Ford routing mechanisms, as specified by RIP [5], to make it suitable for a dynamic and self-starting network mechanism as is required by users wishing to utilize ad hoc networks. Our modifications address some of the previous objections to the use of Bellman-Ford, related to the poor looping properties of such algorithms in the face of broken links and the resulting time dependent nature of the interconnection topology describing the links between the Mobile Hosts. Finally, we describe the ways in which the basic network-layer routing can be modified to provide MAC-layer support for ad-hoc networks.

The FERET Evaluation Methodology for Face-Recognition Algorithms Two of the most critical requirements in support of producing reliable face-recognition systems are a large database of facial images and a testing procedure to evaluate systems. The Face Recognition Technology (FERET) program has addressed both issues through the FERET database of facial images and the establishment of the FERET tests. To date, 14,126 images from 1,199 individuals are included in the FERET database, which is divided into development and sequestered portions of the database. In September 1996, the FERET program administered the third in a series of FERET face-recognition tests. The primary objectives of the third test were to 1) assess the state of the art, 2) identify future areas of research, and 3) measure algorithm performance.

Neural fitted q iteration – first experiences with a data efficient neural reinforcement learning method This paper introduces NFQ, an algorithm for efficient and effective training of a Q-value function represented by a multi-layer perceptron. Based on the principle of storing and reusing transition experiences, a model-free, neural network based Reinforcement Learning algorithm is proposed. The method is evaluated on three benchmark problems. It is shown empirically, that reasonably few interactions with the plant are needed to generate control policies of high quality.

Labels and event processes in the Asbestos operating system Asbestos, a new operating system, provides novel labeling and isolation mechanisms that help contain the effects of exploitable software flaws. Applications can express a wide range of policies with Asbestos's kernel-enforced labels, including controls on interprocess communication and system-wide information flow. A new event process abstraction defines lightweight, isolated contexts within a single process, allowing one process to act on behalf of multiple users while preventing it from leaking any single user's data to others. A Web server demonstration application uses these primitives to isolate private user data. Since the untrusted workers that respond to client requests are constrained by labels, exploited workers cannot directly expose user data except as allowed by application policy. The server application requires 1.4 memory pages per user for up to 145,000 users and achieves connection rates similar to Apache, demonstrating that additional security can come at an acceptable cost.

Switching Stabilization for a Class of Slowly Switched Systems In this technical note, the problem of switching stabilization for slowly switched linear systems is investigated. In particular, the considered systems can be composed of all unstable subsystems. Based on the invariant subspace theory, the switching signal with mode-dependent average dwell time (MDADT) property is designed to exponentially stabilize the underlying system. Furthermore, sufficient condition of stabilization for switched systems with all stable subsystems under MDADT switching is also given. The correctness and effectiveness of the proposed approaches are illustrated by a numerical example.

Automated Detection of Obstructive Sleep Apnea Events from a Single-Lead Electrocardiogram Using a Convolutional Neural Network. In this study, we propose a method for the automated detection of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) from a single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) using a convolutional neural network (CNN). A CNN model was designed with six optimized convolution layers including activation, pooling, and dropout layers. One-dimensional (1D) convolution, rectified linear units (ReLU), and max pooling were applied to the convolution, activation, and pooling layers, respectively. For training and evaluation of the CNN model, a single-lead ECG dataset was collected from 82 subjects with OSA and was divided into training (including data from 63 patients with 34,281 events) and testing (including data from 19 patients with 8571 events) datasets. Using this CNN model, a precision of 0.99%, a recall of 0.99%, and an F-score of 0.99% were attained with the training dataset; these values were all 0.96% when the CNN was applied to the testing dataset. These results show that the proposed CNN model can be used to detect OSA accurately on the basis of a single-lead ECG. Ultimately, this CNN model may be used as a screening tool for those suspected to suffer from OSA.

Convert Harm Into Benefit: A Coordination-Learning Based Dynamic Spectrum Anti-Jamming Approach This paper mainly investigates the multi-user anti-jamming spectrum access problem. Using the idea of “converting harm into benefit,” the malicious jamming signals projected by the enemy are utilized by the users as the coordination signals to guide spectrum coordination. An “internal coordination-external confrontation” multi-user anti-jamming access game model is constructed, and the existence of Nash equilibrium (NE) as well as correlated equilibrium (CE) is demonstrated. A coordination-learning based anti-jamming spectrum access algorithm (CLASA) is designed to achieve the CE of the game. Simulation results show the convergence, and effectiveness of the proposed CLASA algorithm, and indicate that our approach can help users confront the malicious jammer, and coordinate internal spectrum access simultaneously without information exchange. Last but not least, the fairness of the proposed approach under different jamming attack patterns is analyzed, which illustrates that this approach provides fair anti-jamming spectrum access opportunities under complicated jamming pattern.

Adaptive impedance control of a robotic orthosis for gait rehabilitation. Intervention of robotic devices in the field of physical gait therapy can help in providing repetitive, systematic, and economically viable training sessions. Interactive or assist-as-needed (AAN) gait training encourages patient voluntary participation in the robotic gait training process which may aid in rapid motor function recovery. In this paper, a lightweight robotic gait training orthosis w...

Hierarchical Compliance Control of a Soft Ankle Rehabilitation Robot Actuated by Pneumatic Muscles. Traditional compliance control of a rehabilitation robot is implemented in task space by using impedance or admittance control algorithms. The soft robot actuated by pneumatic muscle actuators (PMAs) is becoming prominent for patients as it enables the compliance being adjusted in each active link, which, however, has not been reported in the literature. This paper proposes a new compliance control method of a soft ankle rehabilitation robot that is driven by four PMAs configured in parallel to enable three degrees of freedom movement of the ankle joint. A new hierarchical compliance control structure, including a low-level compliance adjustment controller in joint space and a high-level admittance controller in task space, is designed. An adaptive compliance control paradigm is further developed by taking into account patient's active contribution and movement ability during a previous period of time, in order to provide robot assistance only when it is necessarily required. Experiments on healthy and impaired human subjects were conducted to verify the adaptive hierarchical compliance control scheme. The results show that the robot hierarchical compliance can be online adjusted according to the participant's assessment. The robot reduces its assistance output when participants contribute more and vice versa, thus providing a potentially feasible solution to the patient-in-loop cooperative training strategy.

Nonparametric Bayesian Prior Inducing Deep Network for Automatic Detection of Cognitive Status Pilots’ brain fatigue status recognition faces two important issues. They are how to extract brain cognitive features and how to identify these fatigue characteristics. In this article, a gamma deep belief network is proposed to extract multilayer deep representations of high-dimensional cognitive data. The Dirichlet distributed connection weight vector is upsampled layer by layer in each iteratio...

Fatigue Detection of Pilots’ Brain Through Brains Cognitive Map and Multilayer Latent Incremental Learning Model This work proposes a nonparametric prior induced deep sum-logarithmic-multinomial mixture (DSLMM) model to detect pilots’ cognitive states through the developed brain power map. DSLMM uses multinormal distribution to infer the latent variable of each neuron in the first layer of the network. These latent variables obeyed a sum-logarithmic distribution that is backpropagated to its observation vector and the number of neurons in the next layer. Multinormal distribution is used to segment the extended observation vector to form a matrix associated with the width of the next layer. This work also proposes an adaptive topic-layer stochastic gradient Riemann (ATL-SGR) Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) inference method to learn its global parameters without heuristic assumptions. The experimental results indicate that DSLMM can extract more probability distribution contained in the brain power map layer by layer, and achieve higher pilot cognition detection accuracy.

Neural-Network-Based Event-Triggered Adaptive Control of Nonaffine Nonlinear Multiagent Systems With Dynamic Uncertainties. This article addresses the adaptive event-triggered neural control problem for nonaffine pure-feedback nonlinear multiagent systems with dynamic disturbance, unmodeled dynamics, and dead-zone input. Radial basis function neural networks are applied to approximate the unknown nonlinear function. A dynamic signal is constructed to deal with the design difficulties in the unmodeled dynamics. Moreover...

Image quality assessment: from error visibility to structural similarity. Objective methods for assessing perceptual image quality traditionally attempted to quantify the visibility of errors (differences) between a distorted image and a reference image using a variety of known properties of the human visual system. Under the assumption that human visual perception is highly adapted for extracting structural information from a scene, we introduce an alternative complementary framework for quality assessment based on the degradation of structural information. As a specific example of this concept, we develop a Structural Similarity Index and demonstrate its promise through a set of intuitive examples, as well as comparison to both subjective ratings and state-of-the-art objective methods on a database of images compressed with JPEG and JPEG2000.

Vision meets robotics: The KITTI dataset We present a novel dataset captured from a VW station wagon for use in mobile robotics and autonomous driving research. In total, we recorded 6 hours of traffic scenarios at 10-100 Hz using a variety of sensor modalities such as high-resolution color and grayscale stereo cameras, a Velodyne 3D laser scanner and a high-precision GPS/IMU inertial navigation system. The scenarios are diverse, capturing real-world traffic situations, and range from freeways over rural areas to inner-city scenes with many static and dynamic objects. Our data is calibrated, synchronized and timestamped, and we provide the rectified and raw image sequences. Our dataset also contains object labels in the form of 3D tracklets, and we provide online benchmarks for stereo, optical flow, object detection and other tasks. This paper describes our recording platform, the data format and the utilities that we provide.

A tutorial on support vector regression In this tutorial we give an overview of the basic ideas underlying Support Vector (SV) machines for function estimation. Furthermore, we include a summary of currently used algorithms for training SV machines, covering both the quadratic (or convex) programming part and advanced methods for dealing with large datasets. Finally, we mention some modifications and extensions that have been applied to the standard SV algorithm, and discuss the aspect of regularization from a SV perspective.

GameFlow: a model for evaluating player enjoyment in games Although player enjoyment is central to computer games, there is currently no accepted model of player enjoyment in games. There are many heuristics in the literature, based on elements such as the game interface, mechanics, gameplay, and narrative. However, there is a need to integrate these heuristics into a validated model that can be used to design, evaluate, and understand enjoyment in games. We have drawn together the various heuristics into a concise model of enjoyment in games that is structured by flow. Flow, a widely accepted model of enjoyment, includes eight elements that, we found, encompass the various heuristics from the literature. Our new model, GameFlow, consists of eight elements -- concentration, challenge, skills, control, clear goals, feedback, immersion, and social interaction. Each element includes a set of criteria for achieving enjoyment in games. An initial investigation and validation of the GameFlow model was carried out by conducting expert reviews of two real-time strategy games, one high-rating and one low-rating, using the GameFlow criteria. The result was a deeper understanding of enjoyment in real-time strategy games and the identification of the strengths and weaknesses of the GameFlow model as an evaluation tool. The GameFlow criteria were able to successfully distinguish between the high-rated and low-rated games and identify why one succeeded and the other failed. We concluded that the GameFlow model can be used in its current form to review games; further work will provide tools for designing and evaluating enjoyment in games.

Adapting visual category models to new domains Domain adaptation is an important emerging topic in computer vision. In this paper, we present one of the first studies of domain shift in the context of object recognition. We introduce a method that adapts object models acquired in a particular visual domain to new imaging conditions by learning a transformation that minimizes the effect of domain-induced changes in the feature distribution. The transformation is learned in a supervised manner and can be applied to categories for which there are no labeled examples in the new domain. While we focus our evaluation on object recognition tasks, the transform-based adaptation technique we develop is general and could be applied to nonimage data. Another contribution is a new multi-domain object database, freely available for download. We experimentally demonstrate the ability of our method to improve recognition on categories with few or no target domain labels and moderate to large changes in the imaging conditions.

A Web-Based Tool For Control Engineering Teaching In this article a new tool for control engineering teaching is presented. The tool was implemented using Java applets and is freely accessible through Web. It allows the analysis and simulation of linear control systems and was created to complement the theoretical lectures in basic control engineering courses. The article is not only centered in the description of the tool but also in the methodology to use it and its evaluation in an electrical engineering degree. Two practical problems are included in the manuscript to illustrate the use of the main functions implemented. The developed web-based tool can be accessed through the link http://www.controlweb.cyc.ull.es. (C) 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

GROPING: Geomagnetism and cROwdsensing Powered Indoor NaviGation Although a large number of WiFi fingerprinting based indoor localization systems have been proposed, our field experience with Google Maps Indoor (GMI), the only system available for public testing, shows that it is far from mature for indoor navigation. In this paper, we first report our field studies with GMI, as well as experiment results aiming to explain our unsatisfactory GMI experience. Then motivated by the obtained insights, we propose GROPING as a self-contained indoor navigation system independent of any infrastructural support. GROPING relies on geomagnetic fingerprints that are far more stable than WiFi fingerprints, and it exploits crowdsensing to construct floor maps rather than expecting individual venues to supply digitized maps. Based on our experiments with 20 participants in various floors of a big shopping mall, GROPING is able to deliver a sufficient accuracy for localization and thus provides smooth navigation experience.

5G Virtualized Multi-access Edge Computing Platform for IoT Applications. The next generation of fifth generation (5G) network, which is implemented using Virtualized Multi-access Edge Computing (vMEC), Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies, is a flexible and resilient network that supports various Internet of Things (IoT) devices. While NFV provides flexibility by allowing network functions to be dynamically deployed and inter-connected, vMEC provides intelligence at the edge of the mobile network reduces latency and increases the available capacity. With the diverse development of networking applications, the proposed vMEC use of Container-based Virtualization Technology (CVT) as gateway with IoT devices for flow control mechanism in scheduling and analysis methods will effectively increase the application Quality of Service (QoS). In this work, the proposed IoT gateway is analyzed. The combined effect of simultaneously deploying Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and vMEC applications on a single network infrastructure, and critically in effecting exhibits low latency, high bandwidth and agility that will be able to connect large scale of devices. The proposed platform efficiently exploiting resources from edge computing and cloud computing, and takes IoT applications that adapt to network conditions to degrade an average 30% of end to end network latency.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Automatic driver stress level classification using multimodal deep learning. •Multimodal fusion model based on CNN-LSTM network to recognize driver stress level.•First deep learning approach applied to ECG, vehicle data and environmental data.•Multimodal deep learning approach is effective in detecting driver stress level.•Fusion approach using CNN-LSTM performs better than handcrafted feature extraction.

A predictive controller for autonomous vehicle path tracking This paper presents a model predictive controller (MPC) structure for solving the path-tracking problem of terrestrial autonomous vehicles. To achieve the desired performance during high-speed driving, the controller architecture considers both the kinematic and the dynamic control in a cascade structure. Our study contains a comparative study between two kinematic linear predictive control strategies: The first strategy is based on the successive linearization concept, and the other strategy combines a local reference frame with an approaching path strategy. Our goal is to search for the strategy that best comprises the performance and hardware-cost criteria. For the dynamic controller, a decentralized predictive controller based on a linearized model of the vehicle is used. Practical experiments obtained using an autonomous "Mini-Baja" vehicle equipped with an embedded computing system are presented. These results confirm that the proposed MPC structure is the solution that better matches the target criteria.

An Efficient Visibility Enhancement Algorithm for Road Scenes Captured by Intelligent Transportation Systems The visibility of images of outdoor road scenes will generally become degraded when captured during inclement weather conditions. Drivers often turn on the headlights of their vehicles and streetlights are often activated, resulting in localized light sources in images capturing road scenes in these conditions. Additionally, sandstorms are also weather events that are commonly encountered when driving in some regions. In sandstorms, atmospheric sand has a propensity to irregularly absorb specific portions of a spectrum, thereby causing color-shift problems in the captured image. Traditional state-of-the-art restoration techniques are unable to effectively cope with these hazy road images that feature localized light sources or color-shift problems. In response, we present a novel and effective haze removal approach to remedy problems caused by localized light sources and color shifts, which thereby achieves superior restoration results for single hazy images. The performance of the proposed method has been proven through quantitative and qualitative evaluations. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed haze removal technique can more effectively recover scene radiance while demanding fewer computational costs than traditional state-of-the-art haze removal techniques.

Automatic Detection and Classification of Road Lane Markings Using Onboard Vehicular Cameras This paper presents a new approach for road lane classification using an onboard camera. Initially, lane boundaries are detected using a linear–parabolic lane model, and an automatic on-the-fly camera calibration procedure is applied. Then, an adaptive smoothing scheme is applied to reduce noise while keeping close edges separated, and pairs of local maxima–minima of the gradient are used as cues to identify lane markings. Finally, a Bayesian classifier based on mixtures of Gaussians is applied to classify the lane markings present at each frame of a video sequence as dashed, solid, dashed solid, solid dashed, or double solid. Experimental results indicate an overall accuracy of over 96% using a variety of video sequences acquired with different devices and resolutions.

Pedestrian Tracking Using Online Boosted Random Ferns Learning in Far-Infrared Imagery for Safe Driving at Night. Pedestrian-vehicle accidents that occur at night are a major social problem worldwide. Advanced driver assistance systems that are equipped with cameras have been designed to automatically prevent such accidents. Among the various types of cameras used in such systems, far-infrared (FIR) cameras are favorable because they are invariant to illumination changes. Therefore, this paper focuses on a pedestrian nighttime tracking system with an FIR camera that is able to discern thermal energy and is mounted on the forward roof part of a vehicle. Since the temperature difference between the pedestrian and background depends on the season and the weather, we therefore propose two models to detect pedestrians according to the season and the weather, which are determined using Weber–Fechner's law. For tracking pedestrians, we perform real-time online learning to track pedestrians using boosted random ferns and update the trackers at each frame. In particular, we link detection responses to trajectories based on similarities in position, size, and appearance. There is no standard data set for evaluating the tracking performance using an FIR camera; thus, we created the Keimyung University tracking data set (KMUTD) by combining the KMU sudden pedestrian crossing (SPC) data set [21] for summer nights with additional tracking data for winter nights. The KMUTD contains video sequences involving a moving camera, moving pedestrians, sudden shape deformations, unexpected motion changes, and partial or full occlusions between pedestrians at night. The proposed algorithm is successfully applied to various pedestrian video sequences of the KMUTD; specifically, the proposed algorithm yields more accurate tracking performance than other existing methods.

Effects of Different Alcohol Dosages on Steering Behavior in Curve Driving. Objective: The aim of this article is to explore the detailed characteristics of steering behavior in curve driving at different alcohol dosages. Background: Improper operation of the steering wheel is a contributing factor to increased crash risks on curves. Method: The experiments were conducted using a driving simulator. Twenty-five licensed drivers were recruited to perform the experiments at the four different breath alcohol concentration (BrAC) levels. The steering angle (SA), steering speed (SS), steering reversal rate (SRR), and peak-to-peak value of the steering angle (PP) were used to characterize the steering behavior. The vehicle's speed and the number of lane exceedances per kilometer were also used to examine the driving performance. Results: The SSs on the 200 m (chi(2)(3) = 20.67, p < .001), 500 m (chi(2)(3) = 22.42, p < .001), and 800 m (chi(2)(3) = 22.86, p < .001) radius curves were significantly faster for drivers under the influence of alcohol compared with those given a placebo. There were significant effects of alcohol on the SRR and PP on the 200 m, 500 m, and 800 m radius curves. Conclusion: For all of the curves, the SS, SRR, and PP had a tendency to increase as the BrAC increased. The large PP at a high BrAC, accompanied by the high speed, SS, and SRR, resulted in a high probability of lane exceedance. The use of measures of SS, SRR, and PP aided in the improvement of the accuracy of the intoxication detection for the different types of curves. Application: The most important application is to provide guidance for detecting alcohol-impaired-driving.

Risky Driver Recognition Based on Vehicle Speed Time Series. Risky driving is a major cause of traffic accidents. In this paper, we propose a new method that recognizes risky driving behaviors purely based on vehicle speed time series. This method first retrieves the important distribution pattern of the sampled positive speed-change (value and duration) tuples for individual drivers within different speed ranges. Then, it identifies the risky drivers based...

Driver Fatigue Detection Systems: A Review Driver fatigue has been attributed to traffic accidents; therefore, fatigue-related traffic accidents have a higher fatality rate and cause more damage to the surroundings compared with accidents where the drivers are alert. Recently, many automobile companies have installed driver assistance technologies in vehicles for driver assistance. Third party companies are also manufacturing fatigue detection devices; however, much research is still required for improvement. In the field of driver fatigue detection, continuous research is being performed and several articles propose promising results in constrained environments, still much progress is required. This paper presents state-of-the-art review of recent advancement in the field of driver fatigue detection. Methods are categorized into five groups, i.e., subjective reporting, driver biological features, driver physical features, vehicular features while driving, and hybrid features depending on the features used for driver fatigue detection. Various approaches have been compared for fatigue detection, and areas open for improvements are deduced.

The ApolloScape Dataset for Autonomous Driving Scene parsing aims to assign a class (semantic) label for each pixel in an image. It is a comprehensive analysis of an image. Given the rise of autonomous driving, pixel-accurate environmental perception is expected to be a key enabling technical piece. However, providing a large scale dataset for the design and evaluation of scene parsing algorithms, in particular for outdoor scenes, has been difficult. The per-pixel labelling process is prohibitively expensive, limiting the scale of existing ones. In this paper, we present a large-scale open dataset, ApolloScape, that consists of RGB videos and corresponding dense 3D point clouds. Comparing with existing datasets, our dataset has the following unique properties. The first is its scale, our initial release contains over 140K images - each with its per-pixel semantic mask, up to 1M is scheduled. The second is its complexity. Captured in various traffic conditions, the number of moving objects averages from tens to over one hundred (Figure 1). And the third is the 3D attribute, each image is tagged with high-accuracy pose information at cm accuracy and the static background point cloud has mm relative accuracy. We are able to label these many images by an interactive and efficient labelling pipeline that utilizes the high-quality 3D point cloud. Moreover, our dataset also contains different lane markings based on the lane colors and styles. We expect our new dataset can deeply benefit various autonomous driving related applications that include but not limited to 2D/3D scene understanding, localization, transfer learning, and driving simulation.

Online Palmprint Identification Biometrics-based personal identification is regarded as an effective method for automatically recognizing, with a high confidence, a person's identity. This paper presents a new biometric approach to online personal identification using palmprint technology. In contrast to the existing methods, our online palmprint identification system employs low-resolution palmprint images to achieve effective personal identification. The system consists of two parts: a novel device for online palmprint image acquisition and an efficient algorithm for fast palmprint recognition. A robust image coordinate system is defined to facilitate image alignment for feature extraction. In addition, a 2D Gabor phase encoding scheme is proposed for palmprint feature extraction and representation. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system.

Touch Is Everywhere: Floor Surfaces as Ambient Haptic Interfaces Floor surfaces are notable for the diverse roles that they play in our negotiation of everyday environments. Haptic communication via floor surfaces could enhance or enable many computer-supported activities that involve movement on foot. In this paper, we discuss potential applications of such interfaces in everyday environments and present a haptically augmented floor component through which several interaction methods are being evaluated. We describe two approaches to the design of structured vibrotactile signals for this device. The first is centered on a musical phrase metaphor, as employed in prior work on tactile display. The second is based upon the synthesis of rhythmic patterns of virtual physical impact transients. We report on an experiment in which participants were able to identify communication units that were constructed from these signals and displayed via a floor interface at well above chance levels. The results support the feasibility of tactile information display via such interfaces and provide further indications as to how to effectively design vibrotactile signals for them.

Multimodal Feature-Based Surface Material Classification. When a tool is tapped on or dragged over an object surface, vibrations are induced in the tool, which can be captured using acceleration sensors. The tool-surface interaction additionally creates audible sound waves, which can be recorded using microphones. Features extracted from camera images provide additional information about the surfaces. We present an approach for tool-mediated surface clas...

Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks: A Deep Learning Framework for Traffic Forecasting. Timely accurate traffic forecast is crucial for urban traffic control and guidance. Due to the high nonlinearity and complexity of traffic flow, traditional methods cannot satisfy the requirements of mid-and-long term prediction tasks and often neglect spatial and temporal dependencies. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning framework, Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks (STGCN), to tackle the time series prediction problem in traffic domain. Instead of applying regular convolutional and recurrent units, we formulate the problem on graphs and build the model with complete convolutional structures, which enable much faster training speed with fewer parameters. Experiments show that our model STGCN effectively captures comprehensive spatio-temporal correlations through modeling multi-scale traffic networks and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on various real-world traffic datasets.

Sustainable and Efficient Data Collection from WSNs to Cloud. The development of cloud computing pours great vitality into traditional wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The integration of WSNs and cloud computing has received a lot of attention from both academia and industry. However, collecting data from WSNs to cloud is not sustainable. Due to the weak communication ability of WSNs, uploading big sensed data to the cloud within the limited time becomes a b...

A 3-Layer Rdh Method In Encrypted Domain For Medical Information Security Digitisation of sensitive images demands a lossless security mechanism and a sophisticated privacy preservation technique. Sensitive imagery, e.g., medical, forensic, military images, etc., needs special care during transmission as a little distortion can lead to catastrophic diagnosis mistake. With immense advancements, popularity, and success of service-oriented architecture (SOA), providing safe and secure online medical facility is one hard challenge for both research community and the industry. This paper proposes a 3-layer embedding mechanism enabled reversible data hiding (RDH) scheme with additional electronic patient record (EPR) hiding technique for encrypted medical images. LSB modification and LSB substitution technique are used for the embedding and EPR hiding. The experiments carried out on the medical test images on three levels of embedding and the experimental results show great potential in terms of security, embedding capacity, and recovered image quality.

Geometric attacks on image watermarking systems Synchronization errors can lead to significant performance loss in image watermarking methods, as the geometric attacks in the Stirmark benchmark software show. The authors describe the most common types of geometric attacks and survey proposed solutions.

Genetic Optimization Of Radial Basis Probabilistic Neural Networks This paper discusses using genetic algorithms (CA) to optimize the structure of radial basis probabilistic neural networks (RBPNN), including how to select hidden centers of the first hidden layer and to determine the controlling parameter of Gaussian kernel functions. In the process of constructing the genetic algorithm, a novel encoding method is proposed for optimizing the RBPNN structure. This encoding method can not only make the selected hidden centers sufficiently reflect the key distribution characteristic in the space of training samples set and reduce the hidden centers number as few as possible, but also simultaneously determine the optimum controlling parameters of Gaussian kernel functions matching the selected hidden centers. Additionally, we also constructively propose a new fitness function so as to make the designed RBPNN as simple as possible in the network structure in the case of not losing the network performance. Finally, we take the two benchmark problems of discriminating two-spiral problem and classifying the iris data, for example, to test and evaluate this designed GA. The experimental results illustrate that our designed CA can significantly reduce the required hidden centers number, compared with the recursive orthogonal least square algorithm (ROLSA) and the modified K-means algorithm (MKA). In particular, by means of statistical experiments it was proved that the optimized RBPNN by our designed GA, have still a better generalization performance with respect to the ones by the ROLSA and the MKA, in spite of the network scale having been greatly reduced. Additionally, our experimental results also demonstrate that our designed CA is also suitable for optimizing the radial basis function neural networks (RBFNN).

Current status and key issues in image steganography: A survey. Steganography and steganalysis are the prominent research fields in information hiding paradigm. Steganography is the science of invisible communication while steganalysis is the detection of steganography. Steganography means “covered writing” that hides the existence of the message itself. Digital steganography provides potential for private and secure communication that has become the necessity of most of the applications in today’s world. Various multimedia carriers such as audio, text, video, image can act as cover media to carry secret information. In this paper, we have focused only on image steganography. This article provides a review of fundamental concepts, evaluation measures and security aspects of steganography system, various spatial and transform domain embedding schemes. In addition, image quality metrics that can be used for evaluation of stego images and cover selection measures that provide additional security to embedding scheme are also highlighted. Current research trends and directions to improve on existing methods are suggested.

Hybrid local and global descriptor enhanced with colour information. Feature extraction is one of the most important steps in computer vision tasks such as object recognition, image retrieval and image classification. It describes an image by a set of descriptors where the best one gives a high quality description and a low computation. In this study, the authors propose a novel descriptor called histogram of local and global features using speeded up robust featur...

Secure visual cryptography for medical image using modified cuckoo search. Optimal secure visual cryptography for brain MRI medical image is proposed in this paper. Initially, the brain MRI images are selected and then discrete wavelet transform is applied to the brain MRI image for partitioning the image into blocks. Then Gaussian based cuckoo search algorithm is utilized to select the optimal position for every block. Next the proposed technique creates the dual shares from the secret image. Then the secret shares are embedded in the corresponding positions of the blocks. After embedding, the extraction operation is carried out. Here visual cryptographic design is used for the purpose of image authentication and verification. The extracted secret image has dual shares, based on that the receiver views the input image. The authentication and verification of medical image are assisted with the help of target database. All the secret images are registered previously in the target database. The performance of the proposed method is estimated by Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean square error (MSE) and normalized correlation. The implementation is done by MATLAB platform.

Digital watermarking techniques for image security: a review Multimedia technology usages is increasing day by day and to provide authorized data and protecting the secret information from unauthorized use is highly difficult and involves a complex process. By using the watermarking technique, only authorized user can use the data. Digital watermarking is a widely used technology for the protection of digital data. Digital watermarking deals with the embedding of secret data into actual information. Digital watermarking techniques are classified into three major categories, and they were based on domain, type of document (text, image, music or video) and human perception. Performance of the watermarked images is analysed using Peak signal to noise ratio, mean square error and bit error rate. Watermarking of images has been researched profoundly for its specialized and modern achievability in all media applications such as copyrights protection, medical reports (MRI scan and X-ray), annotation and privacy control. This paper reviews the watermarking technique and its merits and demerits.

A New Efficient Medical Image Cipher Based On Hybrid Chaotic Map And Dna Code In this paper, we propose a novel medical image encryption algorithm based on a hybrid model of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) masking, a Secure Hash Algorithm SHA-2 and a new hybrid chaotic map. Our study uses DNA sequences and operations and the chaotic hybrid map to strengthen the cryptosystem. The significant advantages of this approach consist in improving the information entropy which is the most important feature of randomness, resisting against various typical attacks and getting good experimental results. The theoretical analysis and experimental results show that the algorithm improves the encoding efficiency, enhances the security of the ciphertext, has a large key space and a high key sensitivity, and is able to resist against the statistical and exhaustive attacks.

On Multi-Access Edge Computing: A Survey of the Emerging 5G Network Edge Cloud Architecture and Orchestration. Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is an emerging ecosystem, which aims at converging telecommunication and IT services, providing a cloud computing platform at the edge of the radio access network. MEC offers storage and computational resources at the edge, reducing latency for mobile end users and utilizing more efficiently the mobile backhaul and core networks. This paper introduces a survey on ...

An effective implementation of the Lin–Kernighan traveling salesman heuristic This paper describes an implementation of the Lin–Kernighan heuristic, one of the most successful methods for generating optimal or near-optimal solutions for the symmetric traveling salesman problem (TSP). Computational tests show that the implementation is highly effective. It has found optimal solutions for all solved problem instances we have been able to obtain, including a 13,509-city problem (the largest non-trivial problem instance solved to optimality today).

Exoskeletons for human power augmentation The first load-bearing and energetically autonomous exoskeleton, called the Berkeley Lower Extremity Exoskeleton (BLEEX) walks at the average speed of two miles per hour while carrying 75 pounds of load. The project, funded in 2000 by the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) tackled four fundamental technologies: the exoskeleton architectural design, a control algorithm, a body LAN to host the control algorithm, and an on-board power unit to power the actuators, sensors and the computers. This article gives an overview of the BLEEX project.

Assist-As-Needed Training Paradigms For Robotic Rehabilitation Of Spinal Cord Injuries This paper introduces a new "assist-as-needed" (AAN) training paradigm for rehabilitation of spinal cord injuries via robotic training devices. In the pilot study reported in this paper, nine female adult Swiss-Webster mice were divided into three groups, each experiencing a different robotic training control strategy: a fixed training trajectory (Fixed Group, A), an AAN training method without interlimb coordination (Band Group, B), and an AAN training method with bilateral hindlimb coordination (Window Group, C). Fourteen days after complete transection at the mid-thoracic level, the mice were robotically trained to step in the presence of an acutely administered serotonin agonist, quipazine, for a period of six weeks. The mice that received AAN training (Groups B and C) show higher levels of recovery than Group A mice, as measured by the number, consistency, and periodicity of steps realized during testing sessions. Group C displays a higher incidence of alternating stepping than Group B. These results indicate that this training approach may be more effective than fixed trajectory paradigms in promoting robust post-injury stepping behavior. Furthermore, the constraint of interlimb coordination appears to be an important contribution to successful training.

An ID-Based Linearly Homomorphic Signature Scheme and Its Application in Blockchain. Identity-based cryptosystems mean that public keys can be directly derived from user identifiers, such as telephone numbers, email addresses, and social insurance number, and so on. So they can simplify key management procedures of certificate-based public key infrastructures and can be used to realize authentication in blockchain. Linearly homomorphic signature schemes allow to perform linear computations on authenticated data. And the correctness of the computation can be publicly verified. Although a series of homomorphic signature schemes have been designed recently, there are few homomorphic signature schemes designed in identity-based cryptography. In this paper, we construct a new ID-based linear homomorphic signature scheme, which avoids the shortcomings of the use of public-key certificates. The scheme is proved secure against existential forgery on adaptively chosen message and ID attack under the random oracle model. The ID-based linearly homomorphic signature schemes can be applied in e-business and cloud computing. Finally, we show how to apply it to realize authentication in blockchain.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Optimal PID-type fuzzy logic controller for a multi-input multi-output active magnetic bearing system The performance of the fuzzy controllers depends highly on the proper selection of some design parameters which is usually tuned iteratively via a trial and error process based primarily on engineering intuition. With the recent developments in the area of global optimization, it has been made possible to obtain the optimal values of the design parameters systematically. Nevertheless, it is well known that unless a priori knowledge is available about the optimization search-domain, most of the available time-domain objective functions may result in undesirable solutions. It is consequently important to provide guidelines on how these parameters affect the closed-loop behavior. As a result, some alternative objective functions are presented for the time-domain optimization of the fuzzy controllers, and the design parameters of a PID-type fuzzy controller are tuned by using the proposed time-domain objective functions. Finally, the real-time application of the optimal PID-type fuzzy controller is investigated on the robust stabilization of a laboratory active magnetic bearing system. The experimental results show that the designed PID-type fuzzy controllers provide much superior performances than the linear on-board controllers while retaining lower profiles of control signals.

An overview on fault diagnosis and nature-inspired optimal control of industrial process applications An overview on recent developments in fault diagnosis is carried out.Machine learning, data mining and evolving soft computing techniques are discussed.Real liquid level control, wind turbine and servo system applications are offered.An overview on nature-inspired optimal control of industrial processes is given.New research challenges with strong industrial impact are highlighted. Fault detection, isolation and optimal control have long been applied to industry. These techniques have proven various successful theoretical results and industrial applications. Fault diagnosis is considered as the merge of fault detection (that indicates if there is a fault) and fault isolation (that determines where the fault is), and it has important effects on the operation of complex dynamical systems specific to modern industry applications such as industrial electronics, business management systems, energy, and public sectors. Since the resources are always limited in real-world industrial applications, the solutions to optimally use them under various constraints are of high actuality. In this context, the optimal tuning of linear and nonlinear controllers is a systematic way to meet the performance specifications expressed as optimization problems that target the minimization of integral- or sum-type objective functions, where the tuning parameters of the controllers are the vector variables of the objective functions. The nature-inspired optimization algorithms give efficient solutions to such optimization problems. This paper presents an overview on recent developments in machine learning, data mining and evolving soft computing techniques for fault diagnosis and on nature-inspired optimal control. The generic theory is discussed along with illustrative industrial process applications that include a real liquid level control application, wind turbines and a nonlinear servo system. New research challenges with strong industrial impact are highlighted.

Mobile cloud computing: A survey Despite increasing usage of mobile computing, exploiting its full potential is difficult due to its inherent problems such as resource scarcity, frequent disconnections, and mobility. Mobile cloud computing can address these problems by executing mobile applications on resource providers external to the mobile device. In this paper, we provide an extensive survey of mobile cloud computing research, while highlighting the specific concerns in mobile cloud computing. We present a taxonomy based on the key issues in this area, and discuss the different approaches taken to tackle these issues. We conclude the paper with a critical analysis of challenges that have not yet been fully met, and highlight directions for future work.

Particle swarm optimization with varying bounds Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a stochastic approach that was originally developed to simulate the behavior of birds and was successfully applied to many applications. In the field of evolutionary algorithms, researchers attempted many techniques in order to build probabilistic models that capture the search space properties and use these models to generate new individuals. Two approaches have been recently introduced to incorporate building a probabilistic model of the promising regions in the search space into PSO. This work proposes a new method for building this model into PSO, which borrows concepts from population-based incremental learning (PBIL). The proposed method is implemented and compared to existing approaches using a suite of well-known benchmark optimization functions.

Multi-objective optimization based on an improved cross-entropy method. A case study of a micro-scale manufacturing process The strong points of Estimation-of-Distribution algorithms (EDAs) and specifically cross-entropy methods are widely acknowledged. One of the main advantages of EDAs is that the fusion of prior information into the optimization procedure is straightforward, thereby reducing convergence time when such information is available. This study presents the modified Multi-Objective Cross-Entropy (MOCE+) method, based on a new procedure for addressing constraints: (i) the use of variable cutoff values for selecting the elitist population; and, (ii) filtering of the elitist population after each epoch. We study the proposed method in different test suites and compare its performance with some other well-known optimization methods. The comparative study demonstrates the good figures of merit of the MOCE+ method in complex test suites. Finally, the proposed method is applied to the multi-objective optimization of a micro-drilling process. Two conflicting targets are considered: total drilling time and vibrations on the plane that is perpendicular to the drilling axis. The Pareto front, obtained through the optimization process, is analyzed through quality metrics and the available options in the decision-making process. Overall, the quality metrics of the MOCE+ method were better than the metrics of the other optimization methods considered in this work. The reported optimization of the micro-drilling process with the proposed method could potentially have a direct impact on improvements in industrial efficiency.

Adaptive fuzzy control of switched nonlinear time-varying delay systems with prescribed performance and unmodeled dynamics This paper considers the problem of adaptive prescribed performance control for a class of switched nonlinear systems with time-varying delays and unmodeled dynamics. Fuzzy logic systems are introduced to deal with the unknown nonlinear terms. Utilizing dynamic surface control and convex combination method, a state-feedback controller is constructed. It is proven that all signals of the closed-loop system are bounded. Finally, simulation results are given to show that the proposed scheme is effective.

Grey Wolf Optimizer Algorithm-Based Tuning of Fuzzy Control Systems With Reduced Parametric Sensitivity. This paper proposes an innovative tuning approach for fuzzy control systems (CSs) with a reduced parametric sensitivity using the Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) algorithm. The CSs consist of servo system processes controlled by Takagi-Sugeno-Kang proportional-integral fuzzy controllers (TSK PI-FCs). The process models have second-order dynamics with an integral component, variable parameters, a saturat...

Nonlinear Feedback Design for Fixed-Time Stabilization of Linear Control Systems. Two types of nonlinear control algorithms are presented for uncertain linear plants. Controllers of the first type are stabilizing polynomial feedbacks that allow to adjust a guaranteed convergence time of system trajectories into a prespecified neighborhood of the origin independently on initial conditions. The control design procedure uses block control principles and finite-time attractivity properties of polynomial feedbacks. Controllers of the second type are modifications of the second order sliding mode control algorithms. They provide global finite-time stability of the closed-loop system and allow to adjust a guaranteed settling time independently on initial conditions. Control algorithms are presented for both single-input and multi-input systems. Theoretical results are supported by numerical simulations.

A Convex Characterization Of Gain-Scheduled H-Infinity Controllers An important class of linear time-varying systems consists of plants where the state-space matrices are fixed functions of some time-varying physical parameters theta. Small gain techniques can be applied to such systems to derive robust time-invariant controllers. Yet, this approach is often overly conservative when the parameters theta undergo large variations during system operation, In general, higher performance can be achieved by control laws that incorporate available measurements of theta and therefore ''adjust'' to the current plant dynamics. This paper discusses extensions of H-infinity, synthesis techniques to allow for controller dependence on time-varying but measured parameters. When this dependence is linear fractional, the existence of such gain-scheduled H-infinity, controllers is fully characterized in terms of linear matrix inequalities. The underlying synthesis problem is therefore a convex program for which efficient optimization techniques are available. The formalism and derivation techniques developed here apply to both the continuous- and discrete-time problems. Existence conditions for robust time-invariant controllers are recovered as a special case, and extensions to gain-scheduling in the face of parametric uncertainty are discussed. In particular, simple heuristics are proposed to compute such controllers.

Markov games as a framework for multi-agent reinforcement learning In the Markov decision process (MDP) formalization of reinforcement learning, a single adaptive agent interacts with an environment defined by a probabilistic transition function. In this solipsis-tic view, secondary agents can only be part of the environment and are therefore fixed in their behavior. The framework of Markov games allows us to widen this view to include multiple adaptive agents with interacting or competing goals. This paper considers a step in this direction in which exactly two agents with diametrically opposed goals share an environment. It describes a Q-learning-like algorithm for finding optimal policies and demonstrates its application to a simple two-player game in which the optimal policy is probabilistic.

Dynamic priority protocols for packet voice Since the reconstruction of continuous speech from voice packets is complicated by the variable delays of the packets through the network, a dynamic priority protocol is proposed to minimize the variability of packet delays. The protocol allows the priority of a packet to vary with time. After a discussion of the concept of dynamic priorities, two examples of dynamic priorities are studied through queueing analysis and simulations. Optimal properties of the oldest customer first (OCF) and earliest deadline first (EDF) disciplines are proven, suggesting that they may be theoretically effective in reducing the variability of packet delays. Simulation results of the OCF discipline indicate that the OCF discipline is most effective under conditions of long routes and heavy traffic, i.e., the conditions when delay variability is most likely to be significant. Under OCF, the delays of packets along long routes are improved at the expense of packets along short routes. It is noted that more complex and realistic simulations, including simulations of the EDF discipline, are needed

Spatial augmented reality as a method for a mobile robot to communicate intended movement. •Communication strategies are to allow robots to convey upcoming movements to humans.•Arrows for conveying direction of movement are understood by humans.•Simple maps depicting a sequence of upcoming movements are useful to humans.•Robots projecting arrows and a map can effectively communicate upcoming movement.

Learning Discriminative Features with Multiple Granularities for Person Re-Identification. The combination of global and partial features has been an essential solution to improve discriminative performances in person re-identification (Re-ID) tasks. Previous part-based methods mainly focus on locating regions with specific pre-defined semantics to learn local representations, which increases learning difficulty but not efficient or robust to scenarios with large variances. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end feature learning strategy integrating discriminative information with various granularities. We carefully design the Multiple Granularity Network (MGN), a multi-branch deep network architecture consisting of one branch for global feature representations and two branches for local feature representations. Instead of learning on semantic regions, we uniformly partition the images into several stripes, and vary the number of parts in different local branches to obtain local feature representations with multiple granularities. Comprehensive experiments implemented on the mainstream evaluation datasets including Market-1501, DukeMTMC-reid and CUHK03 indicate that our method robustly achieves state-of-the-art performances and outperforms any existing approaches by a large margin. For example, on Market-1501 dataset in single query mode, we obtain a top result of Rank-1/mAP=96.6%/94.2% with this method after re-ranking.

Attitudes Towards Social Robots In Education: Enthusiast, Practical, Troubled, Sceptic, And Mindfully Positive While social robots bring new opportunities for education, they also come with moral challenges. Therefore, there is a need for moral guidelines for the responsible implementation of these robots. When developing such guidelines, it is important to include different stakeholder perspectives. Existing (qualitative) studies regarding these perspectives however mainly focus on single stakeholders. In this exploratory study, we examine and compare the attitudes of multiple stakeholders on the use of social robots in primary education, using a novel questionnaire that covers various aspects of moral issues mentioned in earlier studies. Furthermore, we also group the stakeholders based on similarities in attitudes and examine which socio-demographic characteristics influence these attitude types. Based on the results, we identify five distinct attitude profiles and show that the probability of belonging to a specific profile is affected by such characteristics as stakeholder type, age, education and income. Our results also indicate that social robots have the potential to be implemented in education in a morally responsible way that takes into account the attitudes of various stakeholders, although there are multiple moral issues that need to be addressed first. Finally, we present seven (practical) implications for a responsible application of social robots in education following from our results. These implications provide valuable insights into how social robots should be implemented.

Asynchronously finite-time H∞ control for morphing aircraft This paper investigates the problem of asynchronously finite-time H-infinity control for morphing aircraft with controller uncertainties. Based on the switched linear parameter-varying model of morphing aircraft, the inherent packet dropouts of system are taken into consideration, which will lead to asynchronous switching. The asynchronous switching means that the switching of controllers will lag behind the switching of corresponding subsystem. Moreover, in order to overcome the undesirable influence of controller uncertainties and guarantee that the corresponding closed-loop system is finite-time bounded with a specified H-infinity performance index, the non-fragile finite-time H-infinity controller is developed via asynchronously switched control. For the purpose of less conservative controller design, the finite-time robust stability analysis of the system is verified by combining mode-dependent average dwell time method and multiple Lyapunov functional method. The sufficient existing conditions and solutions of the controllers are found by solving a series of linear matrix inequalities. Finally, the method proposed in this paper is demonstrated by an illustrative numerical example.

The Sybil Attack Large-scale peer-to-peer systems facesecurity threats from faulty or hostile remotecomputing elements. To resist these threats, manysuch systems employ redundancy. However, if asingle faulty entity can present multiple identities,it can control a substantial fraction of the system,thereby undermining this redundancy. Oneapproach to preventing these &quot;Sybil attacks&quot; is tohave a trusted agency certify identities. Thispaper shows that, without a logically centralizedauthority, Sybil...

BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation Human evaluations of machine translation are extensive but expensive. Human evaluations can take months to finish and involve human labor that can not be reused. We propose a method of automatic machine translation evaluation that is quick, inexpensive, and language-independent, that correlates highly with human evaluation, and that has little marginal cost per run. We present this method as an automated understudy to skilled human judges which substitutes for them when there is need for quick or frequent evaluations.

Computational thinking Summary form only given. My vision for the 21st century, Computational Thinking, will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

Fuzzy logic in control systems: fuzzy logic controller. I.

Switching between stabilizing controllers This paper deals with the problem of switching between several linear time-invariant (LTI) controllers—all of them capable of stabilizing a speci4c LTI process—in such a way that the stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed for any switching sequence. We show that it is possible to 4nd realizations for any given family of controller transfer matrices so that the closed-loop system remains stable, no matter how we switch among the controller. The motivation for this problem is the control of complex systems where con8icting requirements make a single LTI controller unsuitable. ? 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

Tabu Search - Part I

Bidirectional recurrent neural networks In the first part of this paper, a regular recurrent neural network (RNN) is extended to a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN). The BRNN can be trained without the limitation of using input information just up to a preset future frame. This is accomplished by training it simultaneously in positive and negative time direction. Structure and training procedure of the proposed network are explained. In regression and classification experiments on artificial data, the proposed structure gives better results than other approaches. For real data, classification experiments for phonemes from the TIMIT database show the same tendency. In the second part of this paper, it is shown how the proposed bidirectional structure can be easily modified to allow efficient estimation of the conditional posterior probability of complete symbol sequences without making any explicit assumption about the shape of the distribution. For this part, experiments on real data are reported

An intensive survey of fair non-repudiation protocols With the phenomenal growth of the Internet and open networks in general, security services, such as non-repudiation, become crucial to many applications. Non-repudiation services must ensure that when Alice sends some information to Bob over a network, neither Alice nor Bob can deny having participated in a part or the whole of this communication. Therefore a fair non-repudiation protocol has to generate non-repudiation of origin evidences intended to Bob, and non-repudiation of receipt evidences destined to Alice. In this paper, we clearly define the properties a fair non-repudiation protocol must respect, and give a survey of the most important non-repudiation protocols without and with trusted third party (TTP). For the later ones we discuss the evolution of the TTP's involvement and, between others, describe the most recent protocol using a transparent TTP. We also discuss some ad-hoc problems related to the management of non-repudiation evidences.

Dynamic movement and positioning of embodied agents in multiparty conversations For embodied agents to engage in realistic multiparty conversation, they must stand in appropriate places with respect to other agents and the environment. When these factors change, such as an agent joining the conversation, the agents must dynamically move to a new location and/or orientation to accommodate. This paper presents an algorithm for simulating movement of agents based on observed human behavior using techniques developed for pedestrian movement in crowd simulations. We extend a previous group conversation simulation to include an agent motion algorithm. We examine several test cases and show how the simulation generates results that mirror real-life conversation settings.

An improved genetic algorithm with conditional genetic operators and its application to set-covering problem The genetic algorithm (GA) is a popular, biologically inspired optimization method. However, in the GA there is no rule of thumb to design the GA operators and select GA parameters. Instead, trial-and-error has to be applied. In this paper we present an improved genetic algorithm in which crossover and mutation are performed conditionally instead of probability. Because there are no crossover rate and mutation rate to be selected, the proposed improved GA can be more easily applied to a problem than the conventional genetic algorithms. The proposed improved genetic algorithm is applied to solve the set-covering problem. Experimental studies show that the improved GA produces better results over the conventional one and other methods.

Lane-level traffic estimations using microscopic traffic variables This paper proposes a novel inference method to estimate lane-level traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time on road segments where local information could not be measured and assessed directly. The main contributions of the proposed method are 1) the ability to perform lane-level estimations of traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time and 2) the ability to adapt to different traffic regimes by assessing only microscopic traffic variables. We propose a modified Kriging estimation model which explicitly takes into account both spatial and temporal variability. Performance evaluations are conducted using real-world data under different traffic regimes and it is shown that the proposed method outperforms a Kalman filter-based approach.

Convolutional Neural Network-Based Classification of Driver's Emotion during Aggressive and Smooth Driving Using Multi-Modal Camera Sensors. Because aggressive driving often causes large-scale loss of life and property, techniques for advance detection of adverse driver emotional states have become important for the prevention of aggressive driving behaviors. Previous studies have primarily focused on systems for detecting aggressive driver emotion via smart-phone accelerometers and gyro-sensors, or they focused on methods of detecting physiological signals using electroencephalography (EEG) or electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors. Because EEG and ECG sensors cause discomfort to drivers and can be detached from the driver's body, it becomes difficult to focus on bio-signals to determine their emotional state. Gyro-sensors and accelerometers depend on the performance of GPS receivers and cannot be used in areas where GPS signals are blocked. Moreover, if driving on a mountain road with many quick turns, a driver's emotional state can easily be misrecognized as that of an aggressive driver. To resolve these problems, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method of detecting emotion to identify aggressive driving using input images of the driver's face, obtained using near-infrared (NIR) light and thermal camera sensors. In this research, we conducted an experiment using our own database, which provides a high classification accuracy for detecting driver emotion leading to either aggressive or smooth (i.e., relaxed) driving. Our proposed method demonstrates better performance than existing methods.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Federated Learning Over Wireless IoT Networks With Optimized Communication and Resources To leverage massive distributed data and computation resources, machine learning in the network edge is considered to be a promising technique, especially for large-scale model training. Federated learning (FL), as a paradigm of collaborative learning techniques, has obtained increasing research attention with the benefits of communication efficiency and improved data privacy. Due to the lossy communication channels and limited communication resources (e.g., bandwidth and power), it is of interest to investigate fast responding and accurate FL schemes over wireless systems. Hence, we investigate the problem of jointly optimized communication efficiency and resources for FL over wireless Internet of Things (IoT) networks. To reduce complexity, we divide the overall optimization problem into two subproblems, i.e., the client scheduling problem and the resource allocation problem. To reduce the communication costs for FL in wireless IoT networks, a new client scheduling policy is proposed by reusing stale local model parameters. To maximize successful information exchange over networks, a Lagrange multiplier method is first leveraged by decoupling variables, including power variables, bandwidth variables, and transmission indicators. Then, a linear-search-based power and bandwidth allocation method is developed. Given appropriate hyperparameters, we show that the proposed communication-efficient FL (CEFL) framework converges at a strong linear rate. Through extensive experiments, it is revealed that the proposed CEFL framework substantially boosts both the communication efficiency and learning performance of both training loss and test accuracy for FL over wireless IoT networks compared to a basic FL approach with uniform resource allocation.

The Sybil Attack Large-scale peer-to-peer systems facesecurity threats from faulty or hostile remotecomputing elements. To resist these threats, manysuch systems employ redundancy. However, if asingle faulty entity can present multiple identities,it can control a substantial fraction of the system,thereby undermining this redundancy. Oneapproach to preventing these &quot;Sybil attacks&quot; is tohave a trusted agency certify identities. Thispaper shows that, without a logically centralizedauthority, Sybil...

BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation Human evaluations of machine translation are extensive but expensive. Human evaluations can take months to finish and involve human labor that can not be reused. We propose a method of automatic machine translation evaluation that is quick, inexpensive, and language-independent, that correlates highly with human evaluation, and that has little marginal cost per run. We present this method as an automated understudy to skilled human judges which substitutes for them when there is need for quick or frequent evaluations.

Computational thinking Summary form only given. My vision for the 21st century, Computational Thinking, will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

Fuzzy logic in control systems: fuzzy logic controller. I.

Switching between stabilizing controllers This paper deals with the problem of switching between several linear time-invariant (LTI) controllers—all of them capable of stabilizing a speci4c LTI process—in such a way that the stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed for any switching sequence. We show that it is possible to 4nd realizations for any given family of controller transfer matrices so that the closed-loop system remains stable, no matter how we switch among the controller. The motivation for this problem is the control of complex systems where con8icting requirements make a single LTI controller unsuitable. ? 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

Tabu Search - Part I

Bidirectional recurrent neural networks In the first part of this paper, a regular recurrent neural network (RNN) is extended to a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN). The BRNN can be trained without the limitation of using input information just up to a preset future frame. This is accomplished by training it simultaneously in positive and negative time direction. Structure and training procedure of the proposed network are explained. In regression and classification experiments on artificial data, the proposed structure gives better results than other approaches. For real data, classification experiments for phonemes from the TIMIT database show the same tendency. In the second part of this paper, it is shown how the proposed bidirectional structure can be easily modified to allow efficient estimation of the conditional posterior probability of complete symbol sequences without making any explicit assumption about the shape of the distribution. For this part, experiments on real data are reported

An intensive survey of fair non-repudiation protocols With the phenomenal growth of the Internet and open networks in general, security services, such as non-repudiation, become crucial to many applications. Non-repudiation services must ensure that when Alice sends some information to Bob over a network, neither Alice nor Bob can deny having participated in a part or the whole of this communication. Therefore a fair non-repudiation protocol has to generate non-repudiation of origin evidences intended to Bob, and non-repudiation of receipt evidences destined to Alice. In this paper, we clearly define the properties a fair non-repudiation protocol must respect, and give a survey of the most important non-repudiation protocols without and with trusted third party (TTP). For the later ones we discuss the evolution of the TTP's involvement and, between others, describe the most recent protocol using a transparent TTP. We also discuss some ad-hoc problems related to the management of non-repudiation evidences.

Dynamic movement and positioning of embodied agents in multiparty conversations For embodied agents to engage in realistic multiparty conversation, they must stand in appropriate places with respect to other agents and the environment. When these factors change, such as an agent joining the conversation, the agents must dynamically move to a new location and/or orientation to accommodate. This paper presents an algorithm for simulating movement of agents based on observed human behavior using techniques developed for pedestrian movement in crowd simulations. We extend a previous group conversation simulation to include an agent motion algorithm. We examine several test cases and show how the simulation generates results that mirror real-life conversation settings.

An improved genetic algorithm with conditional genetic operators and its application to set-covering problem The genetic algorithm (GA) is a popular, biologically inspired optimization method. However, in the GA there is no rule of thumb to design the GA operators and select GA parameters. Instead, trial-and-error has to be applied. In this paper we present an improved genetic algorithm in which crossover and mutation are performed conditionally instead of probability. Because there are no crossover rate and mutation rate to be selected, the proposed improved GA can be more easily applied to a problem than the conventional genetic algorithms. The proposed improved genetic algorithm is applied to solve the set-covering problem. Experimental studies show that the improved GA produces better results over the conventional one and other methods.

Lane-level traffic estimations using microscopic traffic variables This paper proposes a novel inference method to estimate lane-level traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time on road segments where local information could not be measured and assessed directly. The main contributions of the proposed method are 1) the ability to perform lane-level estimations of traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time and 2) the ability to adapt to different traffic regimes by assessing only microscopic traffic variables. We propose a modified Kriging estimation model which explicitly takes into account both spatial and temporal variability. Performance evaluations are conducted using real-world data under different traffic regimes and it is shown that the proposed method outperforms a Kalman filter-based approach.

Convolutional Neural Network-Based Classification of Driver's Emotion during Aggressive and Smooth Driving Using Multi-Modal Camera Sensors. Because aggressive driving often causes large-scale loss of life and property, techniques for advance detection of adverse driver emotional states have become important for the prevention of aggressive driving behaviors. Previous studies have primarily focused on systems for detecting aggressive driver emotion via smart-phone accelerometers and gyro-sensors, or they focused on methods of detecting physiological signals using electroencephalography (EEG) or electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors. Because EEG and ECG sensors cause discomfort to drivers and can be detached from the driver's body, it becomes difficult to focus on bio-signals to determine their emotional state. Gyro-sensors and accelerometers depend on the performance of GPS receivers and cannot be used in areas where GPS signals are blocked. Moreover, if driving on a mountain road with many quick turns, a driver's emotional state can easily be misrecognized as that of an aggressive driver. To resolve these problems, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method of detecting emotion to identify aggressive driving using input images of the driver's face, obtained using near-infrared (NIR) light and thermal camera sensors. In this research, we conducted an experiment using our own database, which provides a high classification accuracy for detecting driver emotion leading to either aggressive or smooth (i.e., relaxed) driving. Our proposed method demonstrates better performance than existing methods.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Hunting or waiting? Discovering passenger-finding strategies from a large-scale real-world taxi dataset In modern cities, more and more vehicles, such as taxis, have been equipped with GPS devices for localization and navigation. Gathering and analyzing these large-scale real-world digital traces have provided us an unprecedented opportunity to understand the city dynamics and reveal the hidden social and economic “realities”. One innovative pervasive application is to provide correct driving strategies to taxi drivers according to time and location. In this paper, we aim to discover both efficient and inefficient passenger-finding strategies from a large-scale taxi GPS dataset, which was collected from 5350 taxis for one year in a large city of China. By representing the passenger-finding strategies in a Time-Location-Strategy feature triplet and constructing a train/test dataset containing both top- and ordinary-performance taxi features, we adopt a powerful feature selection tool, L1-Norm SVM, to select the most salient feature patterns determining the taxi performance. We find that the selected patterns can well interpret the empirical study results derived from raw data analysis and even reveal interesting hidden “facts”. Moreover, the taxi performance predictor built on the selected features can achieve a prediction accuracy of 85.3% on a new test dataset, and it also outperforms the one based on all the features, which implies that the selected features are indeed the right indicators of the passenger-finding strategies.

Understanding Taxi Service Strategies From Taxi GPS Traces Taxi service strategies, as the crowd intelligence of massive taxi drivers, are hidden in their historical time-stamped GPS traces. Mining GPS traces to understand the service strategies of skilled taxi drivers can benefit the drivers themselves, passengers, and city planners in a number of ways. This paper intends to uncover the efficient and inefficient taxi service strategies based on a large-scale GPS historical database of approximately 7600 taxis over one year in a city in China. First, we separate the GPS traces of individual taxi drivers and link them with the revenue generated. Second, we investigate the taxi service strategies from three perspectives, namely, passenger-searching strategies, passenger-delivery strategies, and service-region preference. Finally, we represent the taxi service strategies with a feature matrix and evaluate the correlation between service strategies and revenue, informing which strategies are efficient or inefficient. We predict the revenue of taxi drivers based on their strategies and achieve a prediction residual as less as 2.35 RMB/h,1 which demonstrates that the extracted taxi service strategies with our proposed approach well characterize the driving behavior and performance of taxi drivers.

Market Mechanism Design for Profitable On-Demand Transport Services. •A new class of on-demand transport services is investigated.•New agent-based models are introduced for passengers and the service provider.•We propose and analyze a market mechanism to jointly schedule, route, and price passengers.•The profit and efficiency of our mechanism are compared.•We demonstrate our mechanism can outperform standard fixed price-rate approaches.

Modeling taxi driver anticipatory behavior. As part of a wider behavioral agent-based model that simulates taxi drivers' dynamic passenger-finding behavior under uncertainty, we present a model of strategic behavior of taxi drivers in anticipation of substantial time varying demand at locations such as airports and major train stations. The model assumes that, considering a particular decision horizon, a taxi driver decides to transfer to such a destination based on a reward function. The dynamic uncertainty of demand is captured by a time dependent pick-up probability, which is a cumulative distribution function of waiting time. The model allows for information learning by which taxi drivers update their beliefs from past experiences. A simulation on a real road network, applied to test the model, indicates that the formulated model dynamically improves passenger-finding strategies at the airport. Taxi drivers learn when to transfer to the airport in anticipation of the time-varying demand at the airport to minimize their waiting time.

Demand, Supply, and Performance of Street-Hail Taxi Travel decisions are fundamental to understanding human mobility, urban economy, and sustainability, but measuring it is challenging and controversial. Previous studies of taxis are limited to taxi stands or hail markets at aggregate spatial units. Here we estimate the dynamic demand and supply of taxis in New York City (NYC) at street segment level, using in-vehicle Global Positioning System (GPS) data which preserve individual privacy. To this end, we model taxi demand and supply as non-stationary Poisson random fields on the road network, and pickups result from income-maximizing drivers searching for impatient passengers. With 868 million trip records of all 13,237 licensed taxis in NYC in 2009 – 2013, we show that while taxi demand are almost the same in 2011 and 2012, it declined about 2% in spring 2013, possibly caused by transportation network companies (TNCs) and fare raise. Contrary to common impression, street-hail taxis out-perform TNCs such as Uber in high-demand locations, suggesting a taxi/TNC regulation change to reduce congestion and pollution. We show that our demand estimates are stable at different supply levels and across years, a property not observed in existing matching functions. We also validate that taxi pickups can be modeled as Poisson processes. Our method is thus simple, feasible, and reliable in estimating street-hail taxi activities at a high spatial resolution; it helps quantify the ongoing discussion on congestion charges to taxis and TNCs.

Self-Attentive Sequential Recommendation Sequential dynamics are a key feature of many modern recommender systems, which seek to capture the 'context' of users' activities on the basis of actions they have performed recently. To capture such patterns, two approaches have proliferated: Markov Chains (MCs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). Markov Chains assume that a user's next action can be predicted on the basis of just their last (or last few) actions, while RNNs in principle allow for longer-term semantics to be uncovered. Generally speaking, MC-based methods perform best in extremely sparse datasets, where model parsimony is critical, while RNNs perform better in denser datasets where higher model complexity is affordable. The goal of our work is to balance these two goals, by proposing a self-attention based sequential model (SASRec) that allows us to capture long-term semantics (like an RNN), but, using an attention mechanism, makes its predictions based on relatively few actions (like an MC). At each time step, SASRec seeks to identify which items are 'relevant' from a user's action history, and use them to predict the next item. Extensive empirical studies show that our method outperforms various state-of-the-art sequential models (including MC/CNN/RNN-based approaches) on both sparse and dense datasets. Moreover, the model is an order of magnitude more efficient than comparable CNN/RNN-based models. Visualizations on attention weights also show how our model adaptively handles datasets with various density, and uncovers meaningful patterns in activity sequences.

Lane-level traffic estimations using microscopic traffic variables This paper proposes a novel inference method to estimate lane-level traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time on road segments where local information could not be measured and assessed directly. The main contributions of the proposed method are 1) the ability to perform lane-level estimations of traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time and 2) the ability to adapt to different traffic regimes by assessing only microscopic traffic variables. We propose a modified Kriging estimation model which explicitly takes into account both spatial and temporal variability. Performance evaluations are conducted using real-world data under different traffic regimes and it is shown that the proposed method outperforms a Kalman filter-based approach.

Flow Prediction in Spatio-Temporal Networks Based on Multitask Deep Learning. Predicting flows (e.g., the traffic of vehicles, crowds, and bikes), consisting of the in-out traffic at a node and transitions between different nodes, in a spatio-temporal network plays an important role in transportation systems. However, this is a very challenging problem, affected by multiple complex factors, such as the spatial correlation between different locations, temporal correlation am...

A sub-constant error-probability low-degree test, and a sub-constant error-probability PCP characterization of NP

An intelligent analyzer and understander of English The paper describes a working analysis and generation program for natural language, which handles paragraph length input. Its core is a system of preferential choice between deep semantic patterns, based on what we call “semantic density.” The system is contrasted:with syntax oriented linguistic approaches, and with theorem proving approaches to the understanding problem.

Picbreeder: evolving pictures collaboratively online Picbreeder is an online service that allows users to collaboratively evolve images. Like in other Interactive Evolutionary Computation (IEC) programs, users evolve images on Picbreeder by selecting ones that appeal to them to produce a new generation. However, Picbreeder also offers an online community in which to share these images, and most importantly, the ability to continue evolving others' images. Through this process of branching from other images, and through continually increasing image complexity made possible by the NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) algorithm, evolved images proliferate unlike in any other current IEC systems. Participation requires no explicit talent from the users, thereby opening Picbreeder to the entire Internet community. This paper details how Picbreeder encourages innovation, featuring images that were collaboratively evolved.

Early DoS/DDoS Detection Method using Short-term Statistics Early detection methods are required to prevent the DoS / DDoS attacks. The detection methods using the entropy have been classified into the long-term entropy based on the observation of more than 10,000 packets and the short-term entropy that of less than 10,000 packets. The long-term entropy have less fluctuation leading to easy detection of anomaly accesses using the threshold, while having the defects in detection at the early attacking stage and of difficulty to trace the short term attacks. In this paper, we propose and evaluate the DoS/DDoS detection method based on the short-term entropy focusing on the early detection. Firstly, the pre-experiment extracted the effective window width; 50 for DDoS and 500 for slow DoS attacks. Secondly, we showed that classifying the type of attacks can be made possible using the distribution of the average and standard deviation of the entropy. In addition, we generated the pseudo attacking packets under a normal condition to calculate the entropy and carry out a test of significance. When the number of attacking packets is equal to the number of arriving packets, the high detection results with False-negative = 5% was extracted, and the effectiveness of the proposed method was shown.

Flymap: Interacting With Maps Projected From A Drone Interactive maps have become ubiquitous in our daily lives, helping us reach destinations and discovering our surroundings. Yet, designing map interactions is not straightforward and depends on the device being used. As mobile devices evolve and become independent from users, such as with robots and drones, how will we interact with the maps they provide? We propose FlyMap as a novel user experience for drone-based interactive maps. We designed and developed three interaction techniques for FlyMap's usage scenarios. In a comprehensive indoor study (N = 16), we show the strengths and weaknesses of two techniques on users' cognition, task load, and satisfaction. FlyMap was then pilot tested with the third technique outdoors in real world conditions with four groups of participants (N = 13). We show that FlyMap's interactivity is exciting to users and opens the space for more direct interactions with drones.

Social Robots for (Second) Language Learning in (Migrant) Primary School Children Especially these days, innovation and support from technology to relieve pressure in education is highly urgent. This study tested the potential advantage of a social robot over a tablet in (second) language learning on performance, engagement, and enjoyment. Shortages in primary education call for new technology solutions. Previous studies combined robots with tablets, to compensate for robot’s limitations, however, this study applied direct human–robot interaction. Primary school children (N = 63, aged 4–6) participated in a 3-wave field experiment with story-telling exercises, either with a semi-autonomous robot (without tablet, using WOz) or a tablet. Results showed increased learning gains over time when training with a social robot, compared to the tablet. Children who trained with a robot were more engaged in the story-telling task and enjoyed it more. Robot’s behavioral style (social or neutral) hardly differed overall, however, seems to vary for high versus low educational abilities. While social robots need sophistication before being implemented in schools, our study shows the potential of social robots as tutors in (second) language learning.

Design and Assessment of a Single-size Semi-soft Assistive Mitten for People with Cervical Spinal Cord Injuries Assistive orthotics have the potential to augment the grasping capabilities of individuals with limited hand functionality. People with a cervical-level spinal cord injury (SCI) lack direct control of semi-flaccid, curled fingers on both hands, which often precludes independent donning and doffing of orthotics, thus limiting their use in daily life. This paper presents a novel orthotic designed to improve hand functionality while facilitating independent daily use for individuals with cervical SCI: the Single-size Semi-soft Assistive Mitten (SSAM). This device utilizes a slim dorsal leaf spring and underactuated cable drive to passively open and actively close the hand, in a way that is robust to variations in hand size. This mitten is intended to improve ease of donning and doffing, as the device is attached to all fingers at once. A prototype is developed based on simulation studies, and grasping performance of the proposed design is validated with five healthy subjects. Successful grasping trials, along with positive user feedback, suggest that the SSAM has a comfortable and intuitive design for long-term, independent use and will enable future studies into feasibility of daily use for people with SCI.

The Sybil Attack Large-scale peer-to-peer systems facesecurity threats from faulty or hostile remotecomputing elements. To resist these threats, manysuch systems employ redundancy. However, if asingle faulty entity can present multiple identities,it can control a substantial fraction of the system,thereby undermining this redundancy. Oneapproach to preventing these &quot;Sybil attacks&quot; is tohave a trusted agency certify identities. Thispaper shows that, without a logically centralizedauthority, Sybil...

BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation Human evaluations of machine translation are extensive but expensive. Human evaluations can take months to finish and involve human labor that can not be reused. We propose a method of automatic machine translation evaluation that is quick, inexpensive, and language-independent, that correlates highly with human evaluation, and that has little marginal cost per run. We present this method as an automated understudy to skilled human judges which substitutes for them when there is need for quick or frequent evaluations.

Computational thinking Summary form only given. My vision for the 21st century, Computational Thinking, will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

Fuzzy logic in control systems: fuzzy logic controller. I.

Switching between stabilizing controllers This paper deals with the problem of switching between several linear time-invariant (LTI) controllers—all of them capable of stabilizing a speci4c LTI process—in such a way that the stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed for any switching sequence. We show that it is possible to 4nd realizations for any given family of controller transfer matrices so that the closed-loop system remains stable, no matter how we switch among the controller. The motivation for this problem is the control of complex systems where con8icting requirements make a single LTI controller unsuitable. ? 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

Tabu Search - Part I

Bidirectional recurrent neural networks In the first part of this paper, a regular recurrent neural network (RNN) is extended to a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN). The BRNN can be trained without the limitation of using input information just up to a preset future frame. This is accomplished by training it simultaneously in positive and negative time direction. Structure and training procedure of the proposed network are explained. In regression and classification experiments on artificial data, the proposed structure gives better results than other approaches. For real data, classification experiments for phonemes from the TIMIT database show the same tendency. In the second part of this paper, it is shown how the proposed bidirectional structure can be easily modified to allow efficient estimation of the conditional posterior probability of complete symbol sequences without making any explicit assumption about the shape of the distribution. For this part, experiments on real data are reported

An intensive survey of fair non-repudiation protocols With the phenomenal growth of the Internet and open networks in general, security services, such as non-repudiation, become crucial to many applications. Non-repudiation services must ensure that when Alice sends some information to Bob over a network, neither Alice nor Bob can deny having participated in a part or the whole of this communication. Therefore a fair non-repudiation protocol has to generate non-repudiation of origin evidences intended to Bob, and non-repudiation of receipt evidences destined to Alice. In this paper, we clearly define the properties a fair non-repudiation protocol must respect, and give a survey of the most important non-repudiation protocols without and with trusted third party (TTP). For the later ones we discuss the evolution of the TTP's involvement and, between others, describe the most recent protocol using a transparent TTP. We also discuss some ad-hoc problems related to the management of non-repudiation evidences.

Dynamic movement and positioning of embodied agents in multiparty conversations For embodied agents to engage in realistic multiparty conversation, they must stand in appropriate places with respect to other agents and the environment. When these factors change, such as an agent joining the conversation, the agents must dynamically move to a new location and/or orientation to accommodate. This paper presents an algorithm for simulating movement of agents based on observed human behavior using techniques developed for pedestrian movement in crowd simulations. We extend a previous group conversation simulation to include an agent motion algorithm. We examine several test cases and show how the simulation generates results that mirror real-life conversation settings.

An improved genetic algorithm with conditional genetic operators and its application to set-covering problem The genetic algorithm (GA) is a popular, biologically inspired optimization method. However, in the GA there is no rule of thumb to design the GA operators and select GA parameters. Instead, trial-and-error has to be applied. In this paper we present an improved genetic algorithm in which crossover and mutation are performed conditionally instead of probability. Because there are no crossover rate and mutation rate to be selected, the proposed improved GA can be more easily applied to a problem than the conventional genetic algorithms. The proposed improved genetic algorithm is applied to solve the set-covering problem. Experimental studies show that the improved GA produces better results over the conventional one and other methods.

Lane-level traffic estimations using microscopic traffic variables This paper proposes a novel inference method to estimate lane-level traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time on road segments where local information could not be measured and assessed directly. The main contributions of the proposed method are 1) the ability to perform lane-level estimations of traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time and 2) the ability to adapt to different traffic regimes by assessing only microscopic traffic variables. We propose a modified Kriging estimation model which explicitly takes into account both spatial and temporal variability. Performance evaluations are conducted using real-world data under different traffic regimes and it is shown that the proposed method outperforms a Kalman filter-based approach.

Convolutional Neural Network-Based Classification of Driver's Emotion during Aggressive and Smooth Driving Using Multi-Modal Camera Sensors. Because aggressive driving often causes large-scale loss of life and property, techniques for advance detection of adverse driver emotional states have become important for the prevention of aggressive driving behaviors. Previous studies have primarily focused on systems for detecting aggressive driver emotion via smart-phone accelerometers and gyro-sensors, or they focused on methods of detecting physiological signals using electroencephalography (EEG) or electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors. Because EEG and ECG sensors cause discomfort to drivers and can be detached from the driver's body, it becomes difficult to focus on bio-signals to determine their emotional state. Gyro-sensors and accelerometers depend on the performance of GPS receivers and cannot be used in areas where GPS signals are blocked. Moreover, if driving on a mountain road with many quick turns, a driver's emotional state can easily be misrecognized as that of an aggressive driver. To resolve these problems, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method of detecting emotion to identify aggressive driving using input images of the driver's face, obtained using near-infrared (NIR) light and thermal camera sensors. In this research, we conducted an experiment using our own database, which provides a high classification accuracy for detecting driver emotion leading to either aggressive or smooth (i.e., relaxed) driving. Our proposed method demonstrates better performance than existing methods.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

An overview on trajectory outlier detection The task of trajectory outlier detection is to discover trajectories or their segments which differ substantially from or are inconsistent with the remaining set. In this paper, we make an overview on trajectory outlier detection algorithms from three aspects. Firstly, algorithms considering multi-attribute. In this kind of algorithms, as many key attributes as possible, such as speed, direction, position, time, are explored to represent the original trajectory and to compare with the others. Secondly, suitable distance metric. Many researches try to find or develop suitable distance metric which can measure the divergence between trajectories effectively and reliably. Thirdly, other studies attempt to improve existing algorithms to find outliers with less time and space complexity, and even more reliable. In this paper, we survey and summarize some classic trajectory outlier detection algorithms. In order to provide an overview, we analyze their features from the three dimensions above and discuss their benefits and shortcomings. It is hope that this review will serve as the steppingstone for those interested in advancing moving object outlier detection.

Dynamic Bike Reposition: A Spatio-Temporal Reinforcement Learning Approach. Bike-sharing systems are widely deployed in many major cities, while the jammed and empty stations in them lead to severe customer loss. Currently, operators try to constantly reposition bikes among stations when the system is operating. However, how to efficiently reposition to minimize the customer loss in a long period remains unsolved. We propose a spatio-temporal reinforcement learning based bike reposition model to deal with this problem. Firstly, an inter-independent inner-balance clustering algorithm is proposed to cluster stations into groups. Clusters obtained have two properties, i.e. each cluster is inner-balanced and independent from the others. As there are many trikes repositioning in a very large system simultaneously, clustering is necessary to reduce the problem complexity. Secondly, we allocate multiple trikes to each cluster to conduct inner-cluster bike reposition. A spatio-temporal reinforcement learning model is designed for each cluster to learn a reposition policy in it, targeting at minimizing its customer loss in a long period. To learn each model, we design a deep neural network to estimate its optimal long-term value function, from which the optimal policy can be easily inferred. Besides formulating the model in a multi-agent way, we further reduce its training complexity by two spatio-temporal pruning rules. Thirdly, we design a system simulator based on two predictors to train and evaluate the reposition model. Experiments on real-world datasets from Citi Bike are conducted to confirm the effectiveness of our model.

Effective Recycling Planning for Dockless Sharing Bikes. Bike-sharing systems become more and more popular in the urban transportation system, because of their convenience in recent years. However, due to the high daily usage and lack of effective maintenance, the number of bikes in good condition decreases significantly, and vast piles of broken bikes appear in many big cities. As a result, it is more difficult for regular users to get a working bike, which causes problems both economically and environmentally. Therefore, building an effective broken bike prediction and recycling model becomes a crucial task to promote cycling behavior. In this paper, we propose a predictive model to detect the broken bikes and recommend an optimal recycling program based on the large scale real-world sharing bike data. We incorporate the realistic constraints to formulate our problem and introduce a flexible objective function to tune the trade-off between the broken probability and recycled numbers of the bikes. Finally, we provide extensive experimental results and case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Spatial-Temporal Inventory Rebalancing for Bike Sharing Systems With Worker Recruitment Bike-sharing systems usually suffer from out-of-service events due to bike underflow or overflow. We propose to recruit workers to rebalance station loads. We partition the complex rebalancing problem in temporal and spatial domains. The temporal domain is divided into a sequence of slices with a fixed duration. In each slice, we allocate a pair of overflow/underflow stations to a worker such that the cost is minimized, which is NP-hard. A 3-approximation algorithm is proposed. We further investigate the worker shortage case and extend the matching algorithm to consider the number of unsatisfied users. Then, the configuration dynamic in the sequence of slices is captured by determining the rebalancing target for each rebalancing operation. We investigate heuristic approaches to minimize the total number of bike movements. Furthermore, we extend our scheme to dockless BSSs using clustering techniques. We simulate our algorithms on both real-world and synthetic datasets. Experiment results show that our approaches can reduce the average total detour per slice. In worker shortage, considering the number of unsatisfied users could improve the long-term performance of rebalancing. Besides, we find that our scheme could maintain worker satisfaction over multiple time slices, which indicates the sustainability of our rebalancing scheme.

CEM: A Convolutional Embedding Model for Predicting Next Locations The widespread use of positioning devices and cameras has given rise to a deluge of trajectory data (e.g., vehicle passage records and check-in data), offering great opportunities for location prediction. One problem that has received much attention recently is predicting next locations for an object given previous locations. Several location prediction methods based on embedding learning have bee...

Completely derandomized self-adaptation in evolution strategies. This paper puts forward two useful methods for self-adaptation of the mutation distribution - the concepts of derandomization and cumulation. Principle shortcomings of the concept of mutative strategy parameter control and two levels of derandomization are reviewed. Basic demands on the self-adaptation of arbitrary (normal) mutation distributions are developed. Applying arbitrary, normal mutation distributions is equivalent to applying a general, linear problem encoding. The underlying objective of mutative strategy parameter control is roughly to favor previously selected mutation steps in the future. If this objective is pursued rigorously, a completely derandomized self-adaptation scheme results, which adapts arbitrary normal mutation distributions. This scheme, called covariance matrix adaptation (CMA), meets the previously stated demands. It can still be considerably improved by cumulation - utilizing an evolution path rather than single search steps. Simulations on various test functions reveal local and global search properties of the evolution strategy with and without covariance matrix adaptation. Their performances are comparable only on perfectly scaled functions. On badly scaled, non-separable functions usually a speed up factor of several orders of magnitude is observed. On moderately mis-scaled functions a speed up factor of three to ten can be expected.

Hiding Traces of Resampling in Digital Images Resampling detection has become a standard tool for forensic analyses of digital images. This paper presents new variants of image transformation operations which are undetectable by resampling detectors based on periodic variations in the residual signal of local linear predictors in the spatial domain. The effectiveness of the proposed method is supported with evidence from experiments on a large image database for various parameter settings. We benchmark detectability as well as the resulting image quality against conventional linear and bicubic interpolation and interpolation with a sinc kernel. These early findings on ldquocounter-forensicrdquo techniques put into question the reliability of known forensic tools against smart counterfeiters in general, and might serve as benchmarks and motivation for the development of much improved forensic techniques.

A tutorial on support vector regression In this tutorial we give an overview of the basic ideas underlying Support Vector (SV) machines for function estimation. Furthermore, we include a summary of currently used algorithms for training SV machines, covering both the quadratic (or convex) programming part and advanced methods for dealing with large datasets. Finally, we mention some modifications and extensions that have been applied to the standard SV algorithm, and discuss the aspect of regularization from a SV perspective.

GameFlow: a model for evaluating player enjoyment in games Although player enjoyment is central to computer games, there is currently no accepted model of player enjoyment in games. There are many heuristics in the literature, based on elements such as the game interface, mechanics, gameplay, and narrative. However, there is a need to integrate these heuristics into a validated model that can be used to design, evaluate, and understand enjoyment in games. We have drawn together the various heuristics into a concise model of enjoyment in games that is structured by flow. Flow, a widely accepted model of enjoyment, includes eight elements that, we found, encompass the various heuristics from the literature. Our new model, GameFlow, consists of eight elements -- concentration, challenge, skills, control, clear goals, feedback, immersion, and social interaction. Each element includes a set of criteria for achieving enjoyment in games. An initial investigation and validation of the GameFlow model was carried out by conducting expert reviews of two real-time strategy games, one high-rating and one low-rating, using the GameFlow criteria. The result was a deeper understanding of enjoyment in real-time strategy games and the identification of the strengths and weaknesses of the GameFlow model as an evaluation tool. The GameFlow criteria were able to successfully distinguish between the high-rated and low-rated games and identify why one succeeded and the other failed. We concluded that the GameFlow model can be used in its current form to review games; further work will provide tools for designing and evaluating enjoyment in games.

Adapting visual category models to new domains Domain adaptation is an important emerging topic in computer vision. In this paper, we present one of the first studies of domain shift in the context of object recognition. We introduce a method that adapts object models acquired in a particular visual domain to new imaging conditions by learning a transformation that minimizes the effect of domain-induced changes in the feature distribution. The transformation is learned in a supervised manner and can be applied to categories for which there are no labeled examples in the new domain. While we focus our evaluation on object recognition tasks, the transform-based adaptation technique we develop is general and could be applied to nonimage data. Another contribution is a new multi-domain object database, freely available for download. We experimentally demonstrate the ability of our method to improve recognition on categories with few or no target domain labels and moderate to large changes in the imaging conditions.

A Web-Based Tool For Control Engineering Teaching In this article a new tool for control engineering teaching is presented. The tool was implemented using Java applets and is freely accessible through Web. It allows the analysis and simulation of linear control systems and was created to complement the theoretical lectures in basic control engineering courses. The article is not only centered in the description of the tool but also in the methodology to use it and its evaluation in an electrical engineering degree. Two practical problems are included in the manuscript to illustrate the use of the main functions implemented. The developed web-based tool can be accessed through the link http://www.controlweb.cyc.ull.es. (C) 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

GROPING: Geomagnetism and cROwdsensing Powered Indoor NaviGation Although a large number of WiFi fingerprinting based indoor localization systems have been proposed, our field experience with Google Maps Indoor (GMI), the only system available for public testing, shows that it is far from mature for indoor navigation. In this paper, we first report our field studies with GMI, as well as experiment results aiming to explain our unsatisfactory GMI experience. Then motivated by the obtained insights, we propose GROPING as a self-contained indoor navigation system independent of any infrastructural support. GROPING relies on geomagnetic fingerprints that are far more stable than WiFi fingerprints, and it exploits crowdsensing to construct floor maps rather than expecting individual venues to supply digitized maps. Based on our experiments with 20 participants in various floors of a big shopping mall, GROPING is able to deliver a sufficient accuracy for localization and thus provides smooth navigation experience.

5G Virtualized Multi-access Edge Computing Platform for IoT Applications. The next generation of fifth generation (5G) network, which is implemented using Virtualized Multi-access Edge Computing (vMEC), Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies, is a flexible and resilient network that supports various Internet of Things (IoT) devices. While NFV provides flexibility by allowing network functions to be dynamically deployed and inter-connected, vMEC provides intelligence at the edge of the mobile network reduces latency and increases the available capacity. With the diverse development of networking applications, the proposed vMEC use of Container-based Virtualization Technology (CVT) as gateway with IoT devices for flow control mechanism in scheduling and analysis methods will effectively increase the application Quality of Service (QoS). In this work, the proposed IoT gateway is analyzed. The combined effect of simultaneously deploying Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) and vMEC applications on a single network infrastructure, and critically in effecting exhibits low latency, high bandwidth and agility that will be able to connect large scale of devices. The proposed platform efficiently exploiting resources from edge computing and cloud computing, and takes IoT applications that adapt to network conditions to degrade an average 30% of end to end network latency.

Attitudes Towards Social Robots In Education: Enthusiast, Practical, Troubled, Sceptic, And Mindfully Positive While social robots bring new opportunities for education, they also come with moral challenges. Therefore, there is a need for moral guidelines for the responsible implementation of these robots. When developing such guidelines, it is important to include different stakeholder perspectives. Existing (qualitative) studies regarding these perspectives however mainly focus on single stakeholders. In this exploratory study, we examine and compare the attitudes of multiple stakeholders on the use of social robots in primary education, using a novel questionnaire that covers various aspects of moral issues mentioned in earlier studies. Furthermore, we also group the stakeholders based on similarities in attitudes and examine which socio-demographic characteristics influence these attitude types. Based on the results, we identify five distinct attitude profiles and show that the probability of belonging to a specific profile is affected by such characteristics as stakeholder type, age, education and income. Our results also indicate that social robots have the potential to be implemented in education in a morally responsible way that takes into account the attitudes of various stakeholders, although there are multiple moral issues that need to be addressed first. Finally, we present seven (practical) implications for a responsible application of social robots in education following from our results. These implications provide valuable insights into how social robots should be implemented.

Secure data sharing scheme for VANETs based on edge computing The development of information technology and the abundance of problems related to vehicular traffic have led to extensive studies on vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to meet various aspects of vehicles, including safety, efficiency, management, and entertainment. In addition to the security applications provided by VANETs, vehicles can take advantage of other services and users who have subscribed to multiple services can migrate between different wireless network areas. Traditionally, roadside units (RSUs) have been used by vehicles to enjoy cross-domain services. This results in significant delays and large loads on the RSUs. To solve these problems, this paper introduces a scheme to share data among different domains. First, a few vehicles called edge computing vehicles (ECVs) are selected to act as edge computing nodes in accordance with the concept of edge computing. Next, the data to be shared are forwarded by the ECVs to the vehicle that has requested the service. This method results in low latency and load on the RSUs. Meanwhile, ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption and elliptic curve cryptography are used to ensure the confidentiality of the information.

SmartVeh: Secure and Efficient Message Access Control and Authentication for Vehicular Cloud Computing. With the growing number of vehicles and popularity of various services in vehicular cloud computing (VCC), message exchanging among vehicles under traffic conditions and in emergency situations is one of the most pressing demands, and has attracted significant attention. However, it is an important challenge to authenticate the legitimate sources of broadcast messages and achieve fine-grained message access control. In this work, we propose SmartVeh, a secure and efficient message access control and authentication scheme in VCC. A hierarchical, attribute-based encryption technique is utilized to achieve fine-grained and flexible message sharing, which ensures that vehicles whose persistent or dynamic attributes satisfy the access policies can access the broadcast message with equipped on-board units (OBUs). Message authentication is enforced by integrating an attribute-based signature, which achieves message authentication and maintains the anonymity of the vehicles. In order to reduce the computations of the OBUs in the vehicles, we outsource the heavy computations of encryption, decryption and signing to a cloud server and road-side units. The theoretical analysis and simulation results reveal that our secure and efficient scheme is suitable for VCC.

Privacy-preserving cloud computing on sensitive data: A survey of methods, products and challenges The increasing volume of personal and sensitive data being harvested by data controllers makes it increasingly necessary to use the cloud not just to store the data, but also to process them on cloud premises. However, security concerns on frequent data breaches, together with recently upgraded legal data protection requirements (like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation), advise against outsourcing unprotected sensitive data to public clouds. To tackle this issue, this survey covers technologies that allow privacy-aware outsourcing of storage and processing of sensitive data to public clouds. Specifically and as a novelty, we review masking methods for outsourced data based on data splitting and anonymization, in addition to cryptographic methods covered in other surveys. We then compare these methods in terms of operations supported on the masked outsourced data, overhead, accuracy preservation, and impact on data management. Furthermore, we list several research projects and available products that have materialized some of the surveyed solutions. Finally, we identify outstanding research challenges.

An Identity-Based And Revocable Data-Sharing Scheme In Vanets Ensuring data confidentiality in a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an increasingly important issue. Message confidentiality, user privacy and access control are the most important problems that affect services provided by VANETs. However, access control that addresses data downloads while preserving users' privacy remains an open problem. Based on a set of attributes, the ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) algorithm proposes a party data encryption/decryption mechanism for shared data; consequently, the algorithm has become a popular solution for data-sharing access control. However, the current CP-ABE schemes are still infeasible for VANETs because these schemes use a single authority and inefficient encryption/decryption and ignore revocation mechanisms. Here, over CP-ABE with revocation, we introduce an identity-based scheme that achieves secure data sharing in VANETs. To reduce the computation load for in-vehicle on-board units (OBUs), we outsource computationally intensive encryption and decryption operations to cloud compute nodes. Attributes are decentralized and managed by application service providers that provide services to vehicles based on subscriptions. Comprehensive experimental results and security analysis show that our scheme achieves fine-grained access control while preserving user privacy. Through implementation, performance analysis demonstrates that our scheme is suitable for VANETs.

Secure message classification services through identity-based signcryption with equality test towards the Internet of vehicles To provide a classification function that has the ability to promote the management of signcrypted messages transmitted by the numerous vehicles in the IoV system, in this paper, we construct an identity-based signcryption with equality test scheme (IBSC-ET) for the first time. Our scheme not only ensures the integrity, confidentiality as well as authentication of messages, but also enables the cloud server to execute the equality test between two ciphertexts signcrypted by the same or different public keys to decide whether the same plaintext is contained, which is counted as the essential factor contributing to the classification. Besides, the identity-based mechanism greatly improves the efficiency since the certificate management problem is avoided. Furthermore, the security of the introduced scheme can be proved in the random oracle model under the Computational Diffie-Hellman Assumption (CDHA) as well as the Bilinear Diffie-Hellman Assumption (BDHA). In the end, the feasibility and efficiency of our proposed are demonstrated through the performance analysis.

Fuzzy logic in control systems: fuzzy logic controller. I.

On the ratio of optimal integral and fractional covers It is shown that the ratio of optimal integral and fractional covers of a hypergraph does not exceed 1 + log d , where d is the maximum degree. This theorem may replace probabilistic methods in certain circumstances. Several applications are shown.

Optimization Of Radio And Computational Resources For Energy Efficiency In Latency-Constrained Application Offloading Providing femto access points (FAPs) with computational capabilities will allow (either total or partial) offloading of highly demanding applications from smartphones to the so-called femto-cloud. Such offloading promises to be beneficial in terms of battery savings at the mobile terminal (MT) and/or in latency reduction in the execution of applications. However, for this promise to become a reality, the energy and/or the time required for the communication process must be compensated by the energy and/or the time savings that result from the remote computation at the FAPs. For this problem, we provide in this paper a framework for the joint optimization of the radio and computational resource usage exploiting the tradeoff between energy consumption and latency. Multiple antennas are assumed to be available at the MT and the serving FAP. As a result of the optimization, the optimal communication strategy (e.g., transmission power, rate, and precoder) is obtained, as well as the optimal distribution of the computational load between the handset and the serving FAP. This paper also establishes the conditions under which total or no offloading is optimal, determines which is the minimum affordable latency in the execution of the application, and analyzes, as a particular case, the minimization of the total consumed energy without latency constraints.

Integrating structured biological data by Kernel Maximum Mean Discrepancy Motivation: Many problems in data integration in bioinformatics can be posed as one common question: Are two sets of observations generated by the same distribution? We propose a kernel-based statistical test for this problem, based on the fact that two distributions are different if and only if there exists at least one function having different expectation on the two distributions. Consequently we use the maximum discrepancy between function means as the basis of a test statistic. The Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) can take advantage of the kernel trick, which allows us to apply it not only to vectors, but strings, sequences, graphs, and other common structured data types arising in molecular biology. Results: We study the practical feasibility of an MMD-based test on three central data integration tasks: Testing cross-platform comparability of microarray data, cancer diagnosis, and data-content based schema matching for two different protein function classification schemas. In all of these experiments, including high-dimensional ones, MMD is very accurate in finding samples that were generated from the same distribution, and outperforms its best competitors. Conclusions: We have defined a novel statistical test of whether two samples are from the same distribution, compatible with both multivariate and structured data, that is fast, easy to implement, and works well, as confirmed by our experiments. Availability: Contact: kb@dbs.ifi.lmu.de

Noninterference for a Practical DIFC-Based Operating System The Flume system is an implementation of decentralized information flow control (DIFC) at the operating system level. Prior work has shown Flume can be implemented as a practical extension to the Linux operating system, allowing real Web applications to achieve useful security guarantees. However, the question remains if the Flume system is actually secure. This paper compares Flume with other recent DIFC systems like Asbestos, arguing that the latter is inherently susceptible to certain wide-bandwidth covert channels, and proving their absence in Flume by means of a noninterference proof in the communicating sequential processes formalism.

Lower Extremity Exoskeletons and Active Orthoses: Challenges and State-of-the-Art In the nearly six decades since researchers began to explore methods of creating them, exoskeletons have progressed from the stuff of science fiction to nearly commercialized products. While there are still many challenges associated with exoskeleton development that have yet to be perfected, the advances in the field have been enormous. In this paper, we review the history and discuss the state-of-the-art of lower limb exoskeletons and active orthoses. We provide a design overview of hardware, actuation, sensory, and control systems for most of the devices that have been described in the literature, and end with a discussion of the major advances that have been made and hurdles yet to be overcome.

Magnetic, Acceleration Fields and Gyroscope Quaternion (MAGYQ)-based attitude estimation with smartphone sensors for indoor pedestrian navigation. The dependence of proposed pedestrian navigation solutions on a dedicated infrastructure is a limiting factor to the deployment of location based services. Consequently self-contained Pedestrian Dead-Reckoning (PDR) approaches are gaining interest for autonomous navigation. Even if the quality of low cost inertial sensors and magnetometers has strongly improved, processing noisy sensor signals combined with high hand dynamics remains a challenge. Estimating accurate attitude angles for achieving long term positioning accuracy is targeted in this work. A new Magnetic, Acceleration fields and GYroscope Quaternion (MAGYQ)-based attitude angles estimation filter is proposed and demonstrated with handheld sensors. It benefits from a gyroscope signal modelling in the quaternion set and two new opportunistic updates: magnetic angular rate update (MARU) and acceleration gradient update (AGU). MAGYQ filter performances are assessed indoors, outdoors, with dynamic and static motion conditions. The heading error, using only the inertial solution, is found to be less than 10 degrees after 1.5 km walking. The performance is also evaluated in the positioning domain with trajectories computed following a PDR strategy.

Inter-class sparsity based discriminative least square regression Least square regression is a very popular supervised classification method. However, two main issues greatly limit its performance. The first one is that it only focuses on fitting the input features to the corresponding output labels while ignoring the correlations among samples. The second one is that the used label matrix, i.e., zero–one label matrix is inappropriate for classification. To solve these problems and improve the performance, this paper presents a novel method, i.e., inter-class sparsity based discriminative least square regression (ICS_DLSR), for multi-class classification. Different from other methods, the proposed method pursues that the transformed samples have a common sparsity structure in each class. For this goal, an inter-class sparsity constraint is introduced to the least square regression model such that the margins of samples from the same class can be greatly reduced while those of samples from different classes can be enlarged. In addition, an error term with row-sparsity constraint is introduced to relax the strict zero–one label matrix, which allows the method to be more flexible in learning the discriminative transformation matrix. These factors encourage the method to learn a more compact and discriminative transformation for regression and thus has the potential to perform better than other methods. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the best performance in comparison with other methods for multi-class classification.

Social Robots for (Second) Language Learning in (Migrant) Primary School Children Especially these days, innovation and support from technology to relieve pressure in education is highly urgent. This study tested the potential advantage of a social robot over a tablet in (second) language learning on performance, engagement, and enjoyment. Shortages in primary education call for new technology solutions. Previous studies combined robots with tablets, to compensate for robot’s limitations, however, this study applied direct human–robot interaction. Primary school children (N = 63, aged 4–6) participated in a 3-wave field experiment with story-telling exercises, either with a semi-autonomous robot (without tablet, using WOz) or a tablet. Results showed increased learning gains over time when training with a social robot, compared to the tablet. Children who trained with a robot were more engaged in the story-telling task and enjoyed it more. Robot’s behavioral style (social or neutral) hardly differed overall, however, seems to vary for high versus low educational abilities. While social robots need sophistication before being implemented in schools, our study shows the potential of social robots as tutors in (second) language learning.

Bio-inspired Computing Techniques for Data Security Challenges and Controls Bio-inspired computing approach is based on the nature and biology for solving complex real-world challenges with enhanced solutions. In this modern era smart technology, connectivity and information play a vital role in the enhancement of human daily life. In the insolent connected world, an eruption of data is increasing and it became exceedingly vulnerable to the threat surface while transfer, collection, and storage of real-time information. Through an international network, this collected information is stored in the public environment. Invaders switch and open the users’ trustworthy material without authorized access for malicious activity. And the hackers are substituting the unique information with the forged records. The collected information is exposed to the assaults, such as malware, phishing, flooding, replay, password attacks, and so on. With this new expertise, various mathematical and optimized computational methods are developed for data safety through biology and nature. Guaranteeing and comforting the security of information necessitate stimulation from the natural sphere. With this advancement, nature has developed biology and nature-based inspired techniques for resolving data security in real time through variation. For data security challenges, these techniques have various graceful solutions with high accurateness and efficacy. In this paper, we review the generous trends in bio-inspired computing methodologies for solving information security issues with extraordinary elucidations. In the future, to design a hybrid bio-inspired security model to enhance data safeguarding on various smart world applications.

The Sybil Attack Large-scale peer-to-peer systems facesecurity threats from faulty or hostile remotecomputing elements. To resist these threats, manysuch systems employ redundancy. However, if asingle faulty entity can present multiple identities,it can control a substantial fraction of the system,thereby undermining this redundancy. Oneapproach to preventing these &quot;Sybil attacks&quot; is tohave a trusted agency certify identities. Thispaper shows that, without a logically centralizedauthority, Sybil...

BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation Human evaluations of machine translation are extensive but expensive. Human evaluations can take months to finish and involve human labor that can not be reused. We propose a method of automatic machine translation evaluation that is quick, inexpensive, and language-independent, that correlates highly with human evaluation, and that has little marginal cost per run. We present this method as an automated understudy to skilled human judges which substitutes for them when there is need for quick or frequent evaluations.

Computational thinking Summary form only given. My vision for the 21st century, Computational Thinking, will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

Fuzzy logic in control systems: fuzzy logic controller. I.

Switching between stabilizing controllers This paper deals with the problem of switching between several linear time-invariant (LTI) controllers—all of them capable of stabilizing a speci4c LTI process—in such a way that the stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed for any switching sequence. We show that it is possible to 4nd realizations for any given family of controller transfer matrices so that the closed-loop system remains stable, no matter how we switch among the controller. The motivation for this problem is the control of complex systems where con8icting requirements make a single LTI controller unsuitable. ? 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

Tabu Search - Part I

Bidirectional recurrent neural networks In the first part of this paper, a regular recurrent neural network (RNN) is extended to a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN). The BRNN can be trained without the limitation of using input information just up to a preset future frame. This is accomplished by training it simultaneously in positive and negative time direction. Structure and training procedure of the proposed network are explained. In regression and classification experiments on artificial data, the proposed structure gives better results than other approaches. For real data, classification experiments for phonemes from the TIMIT database show the same tendency. In the second part of this paper, it is shown how the proposed bidirectional structure can be easily modified to allow efficient estimation of the conditional posterior probability of complete symbol sequences without making any explicit assumption about the shape of the distribution. For this part, experiments on real data are reported

An intensive survey of fair non-repudiation protocols With the phenomenal growth of the Internet and open networks in general, security services, such as non-repudiation, become crucial to many applications. Non-repudiation services must ensure that when Alice sends some information to Bob over a network, neither Alice nor Bob can deny having participated in a part or the whole of this communication. Therefore a fair non-repudiation protocol has to generate non-repudiation of origin evidences intended to Bob, and non-repudiation of receipt evidences destined to Alice. In this paper, we clearly define the properties a fair non-repudiation protocol must respect, and give a survey of the most important non-repudiation protocols without and with trusted third party (TTP). For the later ones we discuss the evolution of the TTP's involvement and, between others, describe the most recent protocol using a transparent TTP. We also discuss some ad-hoc problems related to the management of non-repudiation evidences.

Dynamic movement and positioning of embodied agents in multiparty conversations For embodied agents to engage in realistic multiparty conversation, they must stand in appropriate places with respect to other agents and the environment. When these factors change, such as an agent joining the conversation, the agents must dynamically move to a new location and/or orientation to accommodate. This paper presents an algorithm for simulating movement of agents based on observed human behavior using techniques developed for pedestrian movement in crowd simulations. We extend a previous group conversation simulation to include an agent motion algorithm. We examine several test cases and show how the simulation generates results that mirror real-life conversation settings.

An improved genetic algorithm with conditional genetic operators and its application to set-covering problem The genetic algorithm (GA) is a popular, biologically inspired optimization method. However, in the GA there is no rule of thumb to design the GA operators and select GA parameters. Instead, trial-and-error has to be applied. In this paper we present an improved genetic algorithm in which crossover and mutation are performed conditionally instead of probability. Because there are no crossover rate and mutation rate to be selected, the proposed improved GA can be more easily applied to a problem than the conventional genetic algorithms. The proposed improved genetic algorithm is applied to solve the set-covering problem. Experimental studies show that the improved GA produces better results over the conventional one and other methods.

Lane-level traffic estimations using microscopic traffic variables This paper proposes a novel inference method to estimate lane-level traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time on road segments where local information could not be measured and assessed directly. The main contributions of the proposed method are 1) the ability to perform lane-level estimations of traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time and 2) the ability to adapt to different traffic regimes by assessing only microscopic traffic variables. We propose a modified Kriging estimation model which explicitly takes into account both spatial and temporal variability. Performance evaluations are conducted using real-world data under different traffic regimes and it is shown that the proposed method outperforms a Kalman filter-based approach.

Convolutional Neural Network-Based Classification of Driver's Emotion during Aggressive and Smooth Driving Using Multi-Modal Camera Sensors. Because aggressive driving often causes large-scale loss of life and property, techniques for advance detection of adverse driver emotional states have become important for the prevention of aggressive driving behaviors. Previous studies have primarily focused on systems for detecting aggressive driver emotion via smart-phone accelerometers and gyro-sensors, or they focused on methods of detecting physiological signals using electroencephalography (EEG) or electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors. Because EEG and ECG sensors cause discomfort to drivers and can be detached from the driver's body, it becomes difficult to focus on bio-signals to determine their emotional state. Gyro-sensors and accelerometers depend on the performance of GPS receivers and cannot be used in areas where GPS signals are blocked. Moreover, if driving on a mountain road with many quick turns, a driver's emotional state can easily be misrecognized as that of an aggressive driver. To resolve these problems, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method of detecting emotion to identify aggressive driving using input images of the driver's face, obtained using near-infrared (NIR) light and thermal camera sensors. In this research, we conducted an experiment using our own database, which provides a high classification accuracy for detecting driver emotion leading to either aggressive or smooth (i.e., relaxed) driving. Our proposed method demonstrates better performance than existing methods.

Ethical Considerations Of Applying Robots In Kindergarten Settings: Towards An Approach From A Macroperspective In child-robot interaction (cHRI) research, many studies pursue the goal to develop interactive systems that can be applied in everyday settings. For early education, increasingly, the setting of a kindergarten is targeted. However, when cHRI and research are brought into a kindergarten, a range of ethical and related procedural aspects have to be considered and dealt with. While ethical models elaborated within other human-robot interaction settings, e.g., assisted living contexts, can provide some important indicators for relevant issues, we argue that it is important to start developing a systematic approach to identify and tackle those ethical issues which rise with cHRI in kindergarten settings on a more global level and address the impact of the technology from a macroperspective beyond the effects on the individual. Based on our experience in conducting studies with children in general and pedagogical considerations on the role of the institution of kindergarten in specific, in this paper, we enfold some relevant aspects that have barely been addressed in an explicit way in current cHRI research. Four areas are analyzed and key ethical issues are identified in each area: (1) the institutional setting of a kindergarten, (2) children as a vulnerable group, (3) the caregivers' role, and (4) pedagogical concepts. With our considerations, we aim at (i) broadening the methodology of the current studies within the area of cHRI, (ii) revalidate it based on our comprehensive empirical experience with research in kindergarten settings, both laboratory and real-world contexts, and (iii) provide a framework for the development of a more systematic approach to address the ethical issues in cHRI research within kindergarten settings.

Extended scintillation phase gradient autofocus in future spaceborne P-band SAR mission A future spaceborne P-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) working system will be inevitably influenced by ionospheric scintillation, which tends to cause azimuth decorrelation and azimuth-imaging degradation. The scintillation phase error (SPE) history spatially varies by 2D scenes, and this leads to the complexity of SPE estimation and compensation. In this paper, to address this problem, an approach based on the extended scintillation phase gradient autofocus (ESPGA) technique has been proposed. ESPGA is composed of three modules: local estimation, overall estimation, and correction. First, it employs the block PGA (BPGA) to estimate SPE associated with the local block. Second, by taking advantage of information redundancy of SPE estimates, azimuth splicing and range interpolation are applied to estimate the overall SPE distribution across the whole scene. Then, the estimation result corresponding to the overall SPE is considered to compensate the spatial-variant SPE and mitigate scintillation impacts on the spaceborne SAR images. Finally, a processing experiment based on a simulated image derived from an airborne P-band SAR real scene is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

Prediction, Detection, and Correction of Faraday Rotation in Full-Polarimetric L-Band SAR Data With the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) sensor PALSAR onboard the Advanced Land Observing Satellite, a new full-polarimetric spaceborne L-band SAR instrument has been launched into orbit. At L-band, Faraday rotation (FR) can reach significant values, degrading the quality of the received SAR data. One-way rotations exceeding 25 deg are likely to happen during the lifetime of PALSAR, which will significantly reduce the accuracy of geophysical parameter recovery if uncorrected. Therefore, the estimation and correction of FR effects is a prerequisite for data quality and continuity. In this paper, methods for estimating FR are presented and analyzed. The first unambiguous detection of FR in SAR data is presented. A set of real data examples indicates the quality and sensitivity of FR estimation from PALSAR data, allowing the measurement of FR with high precision in areas where such measurements were previously inaccessible. In examples, we present the detection of kilometer-scale ionospheric disturbances, a spatial scale that is not detectable by ground-based GPS measurements. An FR prediction method is presented and validated. Approaches to correct for the estimated FR effects are applied, and their effectiveness is tested on real data.

Assessing Performance of L- and P-Band Polarimetric Interferometric SAR Data in Estimating Boreal Forest Above-Ground Biomass. Biomass estimation performance using polarimetric interferometric synthetic aperture radar (PolInSAR) data is evaluated at L- and P-band frequencies over boreal forest. PolInSAR data are decomposed into ground and volume contributions, retrieving vertical forest structure and polarimetric layer characteristics. The sensitivity of biomass to the obtained parameters is analyzed, and a set of these p...

Multi-Subaperture PGA for SAR Autofocusing For spotlight mode synthetic aperture radar (SAR) autofocusing, the traditional full-aperture phase gradient autofocus (PGA) algorithm might suffer from performance degradation in the presence of significant high-order phase error and residual range cell migration (RCM), which tend to occur when the coherent processing interval (CPI) is long. Meanwhile, PGA does not perform satisfactorily when applied directly on the stripmap data. To address these shortcomings, we present a multi-subaperture PGA algorithm, which takes advantage of the map drift (MD) technique. It smoothly incorporates the estimation of residual RCM and combines the subaperture phase error (SPE) estimated by PGA in a very precise manner. The methodology and accuracy of PGA-MD are investigated in detail. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of PGA-MD in both the spotlight and the stripmap modes.

Detection and Estimation of Equatorial Spread F Scintillations Using Synthetic Aperture Radar. A significant amount of the data acquired by sun-synchronous space-borne low-frequency synthetic aperture radars (SARs) through the postsunset equatorial sector are distorted by the ionospheric scintillations due to the presence of plasma irregularities and their zonal and vertical drift. In the focused SAR images, the distortions due to the postsunset equatorial ionospheric scintillations appear ...

Measurement of the Ionospheric Scintillation Parameter $C_{k}L$ From SAR Images of Clutter. Space-based synthetic aperture radar (SAR) can be affected by the ionosphere, particularly at L-band and below. A technique is described that exploits the reduction in SAR image contrast to measure the strength of ionospheric turbulence parameter CkL. The theory describing the effect of the ionosphere on the SAR point spread function (PSF) and the consequent effect on clutter is reviewed and exten...

Probabilistic encryption A new probabilistic model of data encryption is introduced. For this model, under suitable complexity assumptions, it is proved that extracting any information about the cleartext from the cyphertext is hard on the average for an adversary with polynomially bounded computational resources. The proof holds for any message space with any probability distribution. The first implementation of this model is presented. The security of this implementation is proved under the interactability assumptin of deciding Quadratic Residuosity modulo composite numbers whose factorization is unknown.

A powerful and efficient algorithm for numerical function optimization: artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm Swarm intelligence is a research branch that models the population of interacting agents or swarms that are able to self-organize. An ant colony, a flock of birds or an immune system is a typical example of a swarm system. Bees' swarming around their hive is another example of swarm intelligence. Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) Algorithm is an optimization algorithm based on the intelligent behaviour of honey bee swarm. In this work, ABC algorithm is used for optimizing multivariable functions and the results produced by ABC, Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Algorithm (PSO) and Particle Swarm Inspired Evolutionary Algorithm (PS-EA) have been compared. The results showed that ABC outperforms the other algorithms.

Toward Massive Machine Type Communications in Ultra-Dense Cellular IoT Networks: Current Issues and Machine Learning-Assisted Solutions The ever-increasing number of resource-constrained machine-type communication (MTC) devices is leading to the critical challenge of fulfilling diverse communication requirements in dynamic and ultra-dense wireless environments. Among different application scenarios that the upcoming 5G and beyond cellular networks are expected to support, such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine type communications (mMTCs), and ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLCs), the mMTC brings the unique technical challenge of supporting a huge number of MTC devices in cellular networks, which is the main focus of this paper. The related challenges include quality of service (QoS) provisioning, handling highly dynamic and sporadic MTC traffic, huge signalling overhead, and radio access network (RAN) congestion. In this regard, this paper aims to identify and analyze the involved technical issues, to review recent advances, to highlight potential solutions and to propose new research directions. First, starting with an overview of mMTC features and QoS provisioning issues, we present the key enablers for mMTC in cellular networks. Along with the highlights on the inefficiency of the legacy random access (RA) procedure in the mMTC scenario, we then present the key features and channel access mechanisms in the emerging cellular IoT standards, namely, LTE-M and narrowband IoT (NB-IoT). Subsequently, we present a framework for the performance analysis of transmission scheduling with the QoS support along with the issues involved in short data packet transmission. Next, we provide a detailed overview of the existing and emerging solutions toward addressing RAN congestion problem, and then identify potential advantages, challenges, and use cases for the applications of emerging machine learning (ML) techniques in ultra-dense cellular networks. Out of several ML techniques, we focus on the application of low-complexity <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -learning approach in the mMTC scenario along with the recent advances toward enhancing its learning performance and convergence. Finally, we discuss some open research challenges and promising future research directions.

Priced Oblivious Transfer: How to Sell Digital Goods We consider the question of protecting the privacy of customers buying digital goods. More specifically, our goal is to allow a buyer to purchase digital goods from a vendor without letting the vendor learn what, and to the extent possible also when and how much, it is buying. We propose solutions which allow the buyer, after making an initial deposit, to engage in an unlimited number of priced oblivious-transfer protocols, satisfying the following requirements: As long as the buyer's balance contains sufficient funds, it will successfully retrieve the selected item and its balance will be debited by the item's price. However, the buyer should be unable to retrieve an item whose cost exceeds its remaining balance. The vendor should learn nothing except what must inevitably be learned, namely, the amount of interaction and the initial deposit amount (which imply upper bounds on the quantity and total price of all information obtained by the buyer). In particular, the vendor should be unable to learn what the buyer's current balance is or when it actually runs out of its funds. The technical tools we develop, in the process of solving this problem, seem to be of independent interest. In particular, we present the first one-round (two-pass) protocol for oblivious transfer that does not rely on the random oracle model (a very similar protocol was independently proposed by Naor and Pinkas [21]). This protocol is a special case of a more general "conditional disclosure" methodology, which extends a previous approach from [11] and adapts it to the 2-party setting.

Cognitive Cars: A New Frontier for ADAS Research This paper provides a survey of recent works on cognitive cars with a focus on driver-oriented intelligent vehicle motion control. The main objective here is to clarify the goals and guidelines for future development in the area of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADASs). Two major research directions are investigated and discussed in detail: 1) stimuli–decisions–actions, which focuses on the driver side, and 2) perception enhancement–action-suggestion–function-delegation, which emphasizes the ADAS side. This paper addresses the important achievements and major difficulties of each direction and discusses how to combine the two directions into a single integrated system to obtain safety and comfort while driving. Other related topics, including driver training and infrastructure design, are also studied.

Wireless Networks with RF Energy Harvesting: A Contemporary Survey Radio frequency (RF) energy transfer and harvesting techniques have recently become alternative methods to power the next generation wireless networks. As this emerging technology enables proactive energy replenishment of wireless devices, it is advantageous in supporting applications with quality of service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, we present a comprehensive literature review on the research progresses in wireless networks with RF energy harvesting capability, referred to as RF energy harvesting networks (RF-EHNs). First, we present an overview of the RF-EHNs including system architecture, RF energy harvesting techniques and existing applications. Then, we present the background in circuit design as well as the state-of-the-art circuitry implementations, and review the communication protocols specially designed for RF-EHNs. We also explore various key design issues in the development of RFEHNs according to the network types, i.e., single-hop networks, multi-antenna networks, relay networks, and cognitive radio networks. Finally, we envision some open research directions.

A multi-objective and PSO based energy efficient path design for mobile sink in wireless sensor networks. Data collection through mobile sink (MS) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is an effective solution to the hot-spot or sink-hole problem caused by multi-hop routing using the static sink. Rendezvous point (RP) based MS path design is a common and popular technique used in this regard. However, design of the optimal path is a well-known NP-hard problem. Therefore, an evolutionary approach like multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) can prove to be a very promising and reasonable approach to solve the same. In this paper, we first present a Linear Programming formulation for the stated problem and then, propose an MOPSO-based algorithm to design an energy efficient trajectory for the MS. The algorithm is presented with an efficient particle encoding scheme and derivation of a proficient multi-objective fitness function. We use Pareto dominance in MOPSO for obtaining both local and global best guides for each particle. We carry out rigorous simulation experiments on the proposed algorithm and compare the results with two existing algorithms namely, tree cluster based data gathering algorithm (TCBDGA) and energy aware sink relocation (EASR). The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs better than both of them in terms of various performance metrics. The results are also validated through the statistical test, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and its least significant difference (LSD) post hoc analysis.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Resource Allocation in UAV-Assisted M2M Communications for Disaster Rescue. Internet of Things (IoT) promotes the awareness about our world and eases human life. In IoT, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications empowers machine-type-devices (MTDs) to cooperatively exchange information and perform actions. Current M2M communications primarily leverages cellular networks to provision reliable services. When a disruptive disaster destroys the local cellular infrastructure, un...

Stochastic Power Adaptation with Multiagent Reinforcement Learning for Cognitive Wireless Mesh Networks As the scarce spectrum resource is becoming overcrowded, cognitive radio indicates great flexibility to improve the spectrum efficiency by opportunistically accessing the authorized frequency bands. One of the critical challenges for operating such radios in a network is how to efficiently allocate transmission powers and frequency resource among the secondary users (SUs) while satisfying the quality-of-service constraints of the primary users. In this paper, we focus on the noncooperative power allocation problem in cognitive wireless mesh networks formed by a number of clusters with the consideration of energy efficiency. Due to the SUs' dynamic and spontaneous properties, the problem is modeled as a stochastic learning process. We first extend the single-agent $(Q)$-learning to a multiuser context, and then propose a conjecture-based multiagent $(Q)$-learning algorithm to achieve the optimal transmission strategies with only private and incomplete information. An intelligent SU performs $(Q)$-function updates based on the conjecture over the other SUs' stochastic behaviors. This learning algorithm provably converges given certain restrictions that arise during the learning procedure. Simulation experiments are used to verify the performance of our algorithm and demonstrate its effectiveness of improving the energy efficiency.

Applications of Economic and Pricing Models for Resource Management in 5G Wireless Networks: A Survey. This paper presents a comprehensive literature review on applications of economic and pricing theory for resource management in the evolving fifth generation (5G) wireless networks. The 5G wireless networks are envisioned to overcome existing limitations of cellular networks in terms of data rate, capacity, latency, energy efficiency, spectrum efficiency, coverage, reliability, and cost per information transfer. To achieve the goals, the 5G systems will adopt emerging technologies such as massive multiple-input multiple-output, mmWave communications, and dense heterogeneous networks. However, 5G involves multiple entities and stakeholders that may have different objectives, e.g., high data rate, low latency, utility maximization, and revenue/profit maximization. This poses a number of challenges to resource management designs of 5G. While the traditional solutions may neither efficient nor applicable, economic and pricing models have been recently developed and adopted as useful tools to achieve the objectives. In this paper, we review economic and pricing approaches proposed to address resource management issues in the 5G wireless networks including user association, spectrum allocation, and interference and power management. Furthermore, we present applications of economic and pricing models for wireless caching and mobile data offloading. Finally, we highlight important challenges, open issues and future research directions of applying economic and pricing models to the 5G wireless networks.

Effective Capacity in Wireless Networks: A Comprehensive Survey. Low latency applications, such as multimedia communications, autonomous vehicles, and Tactile Internet are the emerging applications for next-generation wireless networks, such as 5th generation (5G) mobile networks. Existing physical-layer channel models, however, do not explicitly consider quality-of-service (QoS) aware related parameters under specific delay constraints. To investigate the performance of low-latency applications in future networks, a new mathematical framework is needed. Effective capacity (EC), which is a link-layer channel model with QoS-awareness, can be used to investigate the performance of wireless networks under certain statistical delay constraints. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on existing works, that use the EC model in various wireless networks. We summarize the work related to EC for different networks, such as cognitive radio networks (CRNs), cellular networks, relay networks, adhoc networks, and mesh networks. We explore five case studies encompassing EC operation with different design and architectural requirements. We survey various delay-sensitive applications, such as voice and video with their EC analysis under certain delay constraints. We finally present the future research directions with open issues covering EC maximization.

A hierarchical learning approach to anti-jamming channel selection strategies. This paper investigates the channel selection problem for anti-jamming defense in an adversarial environment. In our work, we simultaneously consider malicious jamming and co-channel interference among users, and formulate this anti-jamming defense problem as a Stackelberg game with one leader and multiple followers. Specifically, the users and jammer independently and selfishly select their respective optimal strategies and obtain the optimal channels based on their own utilities. To derive the Stackelberg Equilibrium, a hierarchical learning framework is formulated, and a hierarchical learning algorithm (HLA) is proposed. In addition, the convergence performance of the proposed HLA algorithm is analyzed. Finally, we present simulation results to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Convert Harm Into Benefit: A Coordination-Learning Based Dynamic Spectrum Anti-Jamming Approach This paper mainly investigates the multi-user anti-jamming spectrum access problem. Using the idea of “converting harm into benefit,” the malicious jamming signals projected by the enemy are utilized by the users as the coordination signals to guide spectrum coordination. An “internal coordination-external confrontation” multi-user anti-jamming access game model is constructed, and the existence of Nash equilibrium (NE) as well as correlated equilibrium (CE) is demonstrated. A coordination-learning based anti-jamming spectrum access algorithm (CLASA) is designed to achieve the CE of the game. Simulation results show the convergence, and effectiveness of the proposed CLASA algorithm, and indicate that our approach can help users confront the malicious jammer, and coordinate internal spectrum access simultaneously without information exchange. Last but not least, the fairness of the proposed approach under different jamming attack patterns is analyzed, which illustrates that this approach provides fair anti-jamming spectrum access opportunities under complicated jamming pattern.

Footprints: history-rich tools for information foraging Inspired by Hill and Hollans original work [7], we have beendeveloping a theory of interaction history and building tools toapply this theory to navigation in a complex information space. Wehave built a series of tools - map, paths, annota- tions andsignposts - based on a physical-world navigation metaphor. Thesetools have been in use for over a year. Our user study involved acontrolled browse task and showed that users were able to get thesame amount of work done with significantly less effort.

Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition. In this work we investigate the effect of the convolutional network depth on its accuracy in the large-scale image recognition setting. Our main contribution is a thorough evaluation of networks of increasing depth using an architecture with very small (3x3) convolution filters, which shows that a significant improvement on the prior-art configurations can be achieved by pushing the depth to 16-19 weight layers. These findings were the basis of our ImageNet Challenge 2014 submission, where our team secured the first and the second places in the localisation and classification tracks respectively. We also show that our representations generalise well to other datasets, where they achieve state-of-the-art results. We have made our two best-performing ConvNet models publicly available to facilitate further research on the use of deep visual representations in computer vision.

Chimp optimization algorithm. •A novel optimizer called Chimp Optimization Algorithm (ChOA) is proposed.•ChOA is inspired by individual intelligence and sexual motivation of chimps.•ChOA alleviates the problems of slow convergence rate and trapping in local optima.•The four main steps of Chimp hunting are implemented.

Space-time modeling of traffic flow. This paper discusses the application of space-time autoregressive integrated moving average (STARIMA) methodology for representing traffic flow patterns. Traffic flow data are in the form of spatial time series and are collected at specific locations at constant intervals of time. Important spatial characteristics of the space-time process are incorporated in the STARIMA model through the use of weighting matrices estimated on the basis of the distances among the various locations where data are collected. These matrices distinguish the space-time approach from the vector autoregressive moving average (VARMA) methodology and enable the model builders to control the number of the parameters that have to be estimated. The proposed models can be used for short-term forecasting of space-time stationary traffic-flow processes and for assessing the impact of traffic-flow changes on other parts of the network. The three-stage iterative space-time model building procedure is illustrated using 7.5min average traffic flow data for a set of 25 loop-detectors located at roads that direct to the centre of the city of Athens, Greece. Data for two months with different traffic-flow characteristics are modelled in order to determine the stability of the parameter estimation.

A simplified dual neural network for quadratic programming with its KWTA application. The design, analysis, and application of a new recurrent neural network for quadratic programming, called simplified dual neural network, are discussed. The analysis mainly concentrates on the convergence property and the computational complexity of the neural network. The simplified dual neural network is shown to be globally convergent to the exact optimal solution. The complexity of the neural network architecture is reduced with the number of neurons equal to the number of inequality constraints. Its application to k-winners-take-all (KWTA) operation is discussed to demonstrate how to solve problems with this neural network.

G2-type SRMPC scheme for synchronous manipulation of two redundant robot arms. In this paper, to remedy the joint-angle drift phenomenon for manipulation of two redundant robot arms, a novel scheme for simultaneous repetitive motion planning and control (SRMPC) at the joint-acceleration level is proposed, which consists of two subschemes. To do so, the performance index of each SRMPC subscheme is derived and designed by employing the gradient dynamics twice, of which a convergence theorem and its proof are presented. In addition, for improving the accuracy of the motion planning and control, position error, and velocity, error feedbacks are incorporated into the forward kinematics equation and analyzed via Zhang neural-dynamics method. Then the two subschemes are simultaneously reformulated as two quadratic programs (QPs), which are finally unified into one QP problem. Furthermore, a piecewise-linear projection equation-based neural network (PLPENN) is used to solve the unified QP problem, which can handle the strictly convex QP problem in an inverse-free manner. More importantly, via such a unified QP formulation and the corresponding PLPENN solver, the synchronism of two redundant robot arms is guaranteed. Finally, two given tasks are fulfilled by 2 three-link and 2 five-link planar robot arms, respectively. Computer-simulation results validate the efficacy and accuracy of the SRMPC scheme and the corresponding PLPENN solver for synchronous manipulation of two redundant robot arms.

Distributed Kalman consensus filter with event-triggered communication: Formulation and stability analysis. •The problem of distributed state estimation in sensor networks with event-triggered communication schedules on both sensor-to-estimator channel and estimator-to-estimator channel is studied.•An event-triggered KCF is designed by deriving the optimal Kalman gain matrix which minimizes the mean squared error.•A computational scalable form of the proposed filter is presented by some approximations.•An appropriate choice of the consensus gain matrix is provided to ensure the stochastic stability of the proposed filter.

Intention-detection strategies for upper limb exosuits: model-based myoelectric vs dynamic-based control The cognitive human-robot interaction between an exosuit and its wearer plays a key role in determining both the biomechanical effects of the device on movements and its perceived effectiveness. There is a lack of evidence, however, on the comparative performance of different control methods, implemented on the same device. Here, we compare two different control approaches on the same robotic suit: a model-based myoelectric control (myoprocessor), which estimates the joint torque from the activation of target muscles, and a dynamic-based control that provides support against gravity using an inverse dynamic model. Tested on a cohort of four healthy participants, assistance from the exosuit results in a marked reduction in the effort of muscles working against gravity with both control approaches (peak reduction of 68.6±18.8%, for the dynamic arm model and 62.4±25.1% for the myoprocessor), when compared to an unpowered condition. Neither of the two controllers had an affect on the performance of their users in a joint-angle tracking task (peak errors of 15.4° and 16.4° for the dynamic arm model and myoprocessor, respectively, compared to 13.1o in the unpowered condition). However, our results highlight the remarkable adaptability of the myoprocessor to seamlessly adapt to changing external dynamics.

A New Payload Partition Strategy in Color Image Steganography. In traditional steganographic schemes, RGB three channels payloads are assigned equally in a true color image. In fact, the security of color image steganography relates not only to data-embedding algorithms but also to different payload partition. How to exploit inter-channel correlations to allocate payload for performance enhancement is still an open issue in color image steganography. In this ...

Geometric attacks on image watermarking systems Synchronization errors can lead to significant performance loss in image watermarking methods, as the geometric attacks in the Stirmark benchmark software show. The authors describe the most common types of geometric attacks and survey proposed solutions.

Genetic Optimization Of Radial Basis Probabilistic Neural Networks This paper discusses using genetic algorithms (CA) to optimize the structure of radial basis probabilistic neural networks (RBPNN), including how to select hidden centers of the first hidden layer and to determine the controlling parameter of Gaussian kernel functions. In the process of constructing the genetic algorithm, a novel encoding method is proposed for optimizing the RBPNN structure. This encoding method can not only make the selected hidden centers sufficiently reflect the key distribution characteristic in the space of training samples set and reduce the hidden centers number as few as possible, but also simultaneously determine the optimum controlling parameters of Gaussian kernel functions matching the selected hidden centers. Additionally, we also constructively propose a new fitness function so as to make the designed RBPNN as simple as possible in the network structure in the case of not losing the network performance. Finally, we take the two benchmark problems of discriminating two-spiral problem and classifying the iris data, for example, to test and evaluate this designed GA. The experimental results illustrate that our designed CA can significantly reduce the required hidden centers number, compared with the recursive orthogonal least square algorithm (ROLSA) and the modified K-means algorithm (MKA). In particular, by means of statistical experiments it was proved that the optimized RBPNN by our designed GA, have still a better generalization performance with respect to the ones by the ROLSA and the MKA, in spite of the network scale having been greatly reduced. Additionally, our experimental results also demonstrate that our designed CA is also suitable for optimizing the radial basis function neural networks (RBFNN).

Current status and key issues in image steganography: A survey. Steganography and steganalysis are the prominent research fields in information hiding paradigm. Steganography is the science of invisible communication while steganalysis is the detection of steganography. Steganography means “covered writing” that hides the existence of the message itself. Digital steganography provides potential for private and secure communication that has become the necessity of most of the applications in today’s world. Various multimedia carriers such as audio, text, video, image can act as cover media to carry secret information. In this paper, we have focused only on image steganography. This article provides a review of fundamental concepts, evaluation measures and security aspects of steganography system, various spatial and transform domain embedding schemes. In addition, image quality metrics that can be used for evaluation of stego images and cover selection measures that provide additional security to embedding scheme are also highlighted. Current research trends and directions to improve on existing methods are suggested.

Hybrid local and global descriptor enhanced with colour information. Feature extraction is one of the most important steps in computer vision tasks such as object recognition, image retrieval and image classification. It describes an image by a set of descriptors where the best one gives a high quality description and a low computation. In this study, the authors propose a novel descriptor called histogram of local and global features using speeded up robust featur...

Secure visual cryptography for medical image using modified cuckoo search. Optimal secure visual cryptography for brain MRI medical image is proposed in this paper. Initially, the brain MRI images are selected and then discrete wavelet transform is applied to the brain MRI image for partitioning the image into blocks. Then Gaussian based cuckoo search algorithm is utilized to select the optimal position for every block. Next the proposed technique creates the dual shares from the secret image. Then the secret shares are embedded in the corresponding positions of the blocks. After embedding, the extraction operation is carried out. Here visual cryptographic design is used for the purpose of image authentication and verification. The extracted secret image has dual shares, based on that the receiver views the input image. The authentication and verification of medical image are assisted with the help of target database. All the secret images are registered previously in the target database. The performance of the proposed method is estimated by Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR), Mean square error (MSE) and normalized correlation. The implementation is done by MATLAB platform.

Digital watermarking techniques for image security: a review Multimedia technology usages is increasing day by day and to provide authorized data and protecting the secret information from unauthorized use is highly difficult and involves a complex process. By using the watermarking technique, only authorized user can use the data. Digital watermarking is a widely used technology for the protection of digital data. Digital watermarking deals with the embedding of secret data into actual information. Digital watermarking techniques are classified into three major categories, and they were based on domain, type of document (text, image, music or video) and human perception. Performance of the watermarked images is analysed using Peak signal to noise ratio, mean square error and bit error rate. Watermarking of images has been researched profoundly for its specialized and modern achievability in all media applications such as copyrights protection, medical reports (MRI scan and X-ray), annotation and privacy control. This paper reviews the watermarking technique and its merits and demerits.

Secure and Robust Fragile Watermarking Scheme for Medical Images. Due to the advances in computer-based communication and health services over the past decade, the need for image security becomes urgent to address the requirements of both safety and non-safety in medical applications. This paper proposes a new fragile watermarking-based scheme for image authentication and self-recovery for medical applications. The proposed scheme locates image tampering as well as recovers the original image. A host image is broken into 4 x 4 blocks and singular value decomposition (SVD) is applied by inserting the traces of block wise SVD into the least significant bit of the image pixels to figure out the transformation in the original image. Two authentication bits namely block authentication and self-recovery bits are used to survive the vector quantization attack. The insertion of self-recovery bits is determined with Arnold transformation, which recovers the original image even after a high tampering rate. SVD-based watermarking information improves the image authentication and provides away to detect different attacked area of the watermarked image. The proposed scheme is tested against different types of attacks such as text removal attack, text insertion attack, and copy and paste attack. Compared with the state-of-the art methods, the proposed scheme greatly improves both tamper localization accuracy and the peak signal to noise ratio of self-recovered image.

Dynamic Computation Offloading for Mobile-Edge Computing with Energy Harvesting Devices. Mobile-edge computing (MEC) is an emerging paradigm to meet the ever-increasing computation demands from mobile applications. By offloading the computationally intensive workloads to the MEC server, the quality of computation experience, e.g., the execution latency, could be greatly improved. Nevertheless, as the on-device battery capacities are limited, computation would be interrupted when the battery energy runs out. To provide satisfactory computation performance as well as achieving green computing, it is of significant importance to seek renewable energy sources to power mobile devices via energy harvesting (EH) technologies. In this paper, we will investigate a green MEC system with EH devices and develop an effective computation offloading strategy. The execution cost, which addresses both the execution latency and task failure, is adopted as the performance metric. A low-complexity online algorithm is proposed, namely, the Lyapunov optimization-based dynamic computation offloading algorithm, which jointly decides the offloading decision, the CPU-cycle frequencies for mobile execution, and the transmit power for computation offloading. A unique advantage of this algorithm is that the decisions depend only on the current system state without requiring distribution information of the computation task request, wireless channel, and EH processes. The implementation of the algorithm only requires to solve a deterministic problem in each time slot, for which the optimal solution can be obtained either in closed form or by bisection search. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is shown to be asymptotically optimal via rigorous analysis. Sample simulation results shall be presented to corroborate the theoretical analysis as well as validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Social Adaptive Navigation Support for Open Corpus Electronic Textbooks Closed corpus AH systems demonstrate what is possible to achieve with adaptive hypermedia technologies; however they are impractical for dealing with the large volume of open corpus resources. Our system, Knowledge Sea II, presented in this paper explores social adaptive navigation support, an approach for providing personalized guidance in the open corpus context. Following the ideas of social navigation, we have attempted to organize a personalized navigation support that is based on past learners' interaction with the system. The social adaptive navigation support implemented in our system was considered quite useful by students participating in the classroom study of Knowledge Sea II. At the same time, some user comments indicated the need to provide more powerful navigation support.

A dual neural network for redundancy resolution of kinematically redundant manipulators subject to joint limits and joint velocity limits. In this paper, a recurrent neural network called the dual neural network is proposed for online redundancy resolution of kinematically redundant manipulators. Physical constraints such as joint limits and joint velocity limits, together with the drift-free criterion as a secondary task, are incorporated into the problem formulation of redundancy resolution. Compared to other recurrent neural networks, the dual neural network is piecewise linear and has much simpler architecture with only one layer of neurons. The dual neural network is shown to be globally (exponentially) convergent to optimal solutions. The dual neural network is simulated to control the PA10 robot manipulator with effectiveness demonstrated.

An efficient conditionally anonymous ring signature in the random oracle model A conditionally anonymous ring signature is an exception since the anonymity is conditional. Specifically, it allows an entity to confirm/refute the signature that he generated before. A group signature also shares the same property since a group manager can revoke a signer's anonymity using the trapdoor information. However, the special node (i.e., group manager) does not exist in the group in order to satisfy the ad hoc fashion. In this paper, we construct a new conditionally anonymous ring signature, in which the actual signer can be traced without the help of the group manager. The big advantage of the confirmation and disavowal protocols designed by us are non-interactive with constant costs while the known schemes suffer from the linear cost in terms of the ring size n or security parameter s.

A Covert Channel Over VoLTE via Adjusting Silence Periods. Covert channels represent unforeseen communication methods that exploit authorized overt communication as the carrier medium for covert messages. Covert channels can be a secure and effective means of transmitting confidential information hidden in overt traffic. For covert timing channel, the covert message is usually modulated into inter-packet delays (IPDs) of legitimate traffic, which is not suitable for voice over LTE (VoLTE) since the IPDs of VoLTE traffic are fixed to lose the possibility of being modulated. For this reason, we propose a covert channel via adjusting silence periods, which modulates covert message by the postponing or extending silence periods in VoLTE traffic. To keep the robustness, we employ the Gray code to encode the covert message to reduce the impact of packet loss. Moreover, the proposed covert channel enables the tradeoff between the robustness and voice quality which is an important performance indicator for VoLTE. The experiment results show that the proposed covert channel is undetectable by statistical tests and outperforms the other covert channels based on IPDs in terms of robustness.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

A Robust Anonymous Authentication Scheme using Biometrics for Digital Rights Management System As digital content transmission through the internet is convenient and quick, so the outspread of digital content is very high. However, along with this incredible speed and ease, current communication technologies and computers have also brought with them plenty of digital rights management complications. Digital Rights Management Systems are designed to limit the access to the utilization, alter...

A Certificateless Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Digital Rights Management System.

An Improved RSA Based User Authentication and Session Key Agreement Protocol Usable in TMIS. Recently, Giri et al.'s proposed a RSA cryptosystem based remote user authentication scheme for telecare medical information system and claimed that the protocol is secure against all the relevant security attacks. However, we have scrutinized the Giri et al.'s protocol and pointed out that the protocol is not secure against off-line password guessing attack, privileged insider attack and also suffers from anonymity problem. Moreover, the extension of password guessing attack leads to more security weaknesses. Therefore, this protocol needs improvement in terms of security before implementing in real-life application. To fix the mentioned security pitfalls, this paper proposes an improved scheme over Giri et al.'s scheme, which preserves user anonymity property. We have then simulated the proposed protocol using widely-accepted AVISPA tool which ensures that the protocol is SAFE under OFMC and CL-AtSe models, that means the same protocol is secure against active and passive attacks including replay and man-in-the-middle attacks. The informal cryptanalysis has been also presented, which confirmed that the proposed protocol provides well security protection on the relevant security attacks. The performance analysis section compares the proposed protocol with other existing protocols in terms of security and it has been observed that the protocol provides more security and achieves additional functionalities such as user anonymity and session key verification.

A privacy enabling content distribution framework for digital rights management

Privacy Preserving Location-based Content Distribution Framework for Digital Rights Management Systems Advancement in network technology provides an opportunity for e-commerce industries to sell digital content. However, multimedia content has the drawback of easy copy and redistribution, which causes rampant piracy. Digital rights management (DRM) systems are developed to address content piracy. Basically, DRM focuses to control content consumption and distribution. In general, to provide copyrigh...

Computational Efficient Authenticated Digital Content Distribution Frameworks for DRM Systems: Review and Outlook Advancement in digital technologies presents a user-friendly environment for the digital content distribution. However, it makes digital content prone to piracy issues. Digital rights management (DRM) systems aim to ensure the authorized content usage. As the digital content broadcasts through the public network, a secure and authorized content access mechanism is required. As digital media users ...

Probabilistic encryption A new probabilistic model of data encryption is introduced. For this model, under suitable complexity assumptions, it is proved that extracting any information about the cleartext from the cyphertext is hard on the average for an adversary with polynomially bounded computational resources. The proof holds for any message space with any probability distribution. The first implementation of this model is presented. The security of this implementation is proved under the interactability assumptin of deciding Quadratic Residuosity modulo composite numbers whose factorization is unknown.

A powerful and efficient algorithm for numerical function optimization: artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm Swarm intelligence is a research branch that models the population of interacting agents or swarms that are able to self-organize. An ant colony, a flock of birds or an immune system is a typical example of a swarm system. Bees' swarming around their hive is another example of swarm intelligence. Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) Algorithm is an optimization algorithm based on the intelligent behaviour of honey bee swarm. In this work, ABC algorithm is used for optimizing multivariable functions and the results produced by ABC, Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Algorithm (PSO) and Particle Swarm Inspired Evolutionary Algorithm (PS-EA) have been compared. The results showed that ABC outperforms the other algorithms.

Toward Massive Machine Type Communications in Ultra-Dense Cellular IoT Networks: Current Issues and Machine Learning-Assisted Solutions The ever-increasing number of resource-constrained machine-type communication (MTC) devices is leading to the critical challenge of fulfilling diverse communication requirements in dynamic and ultra-dense wireless environments. Among different application scenarios that the upcoming 5G and beyond cellular networks are expected to support, such as enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine type communications (mMTCs), and ultra-reliable and low latency communications (URLLCs), the mMTC brings the unique technical challenge of supporting a huge number of MTC devices in cellular networks, which is the main focus of this paper. The related challenges include quality of service (QoS) provisioning, handling highly dynamic and sporadic MTC traffic, huge signalling overhead, and radio access network (RAN) congestion. In this regard, this paper aims to identify and analyze the involved technical issues, to review recent advances, to highlight potential solutions and to propose new research directions. First, starting with an overview of mMTC features and QoS provisioning issues, we present the key enablers for mMTC in cellular networks. Along with the highlights on the inefficiency of the legacy random access (RA) procedure in the mMTC scenario, we then present the key features and channel access mechanisms in the emerging cellular IoT standards, namely, LTE-M and narrowband IoT (NB-IoT). Subsequently, we present a framework for the performance analysis of transmission scheduling with the QoS support along with the issues involved in short data packet transmission. Next, we provide a detailed overview of the existing and emerging solutions toward addressing RAN congestion problem, and then identify potential advantages, challenges, and use cases for the applications of emerging machine learning (ML) techniques in ultra-dense cellular networks. Out of several ML techniques, we focus on the application of low-complexity <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -learning approach in the mMTC scenario along with the recent advances toward enhancing its learning performance and convergence. Finally, we discuss some open research challenges and promising future research directions.

Priced Oblivious Transfer: How to Sell Digital Goods We consider the question of protecting the privacy of customers buying digital goods. More specifically, our goal is to allow a buyer to purchase digital goods from a vendor without letting the vendor learn what, and to the extent possible also when and how much, it is buying. We propose solutions which allow the buyer, after making an initial deposit, to engage in an unlimited number of priced oblivious-transfer protocols, satisfying the following requirements: As long as the buyer's balance contains sufficient funds, it will successfully retrieve the selected item and its balance will be debited by the item's price. However, the buyer should be unable to retrieve an item whose cost exceeds its remaining balance. The vendor should learn nothing except what must inevitably be learned, namely, the amount of interaction and the initial deposit amount (which imply upper bounds on the quantity and total price of all information obtained by the buyer). In particular, the vendor should be unable to learn what the buyer's current balance is or when it actually runs out of its funds. The technical tools we develop, in the process of solving this problem, seem to be of independent interest. In particular, we present the first one-round (two-pass) protocol for oblivious transfer that does not rely on the random oracle model (a very similar protocol was independently proposed by Naor and Pinkas [21]). This protocol is a special case of a more general "conditional disclosure" methodology, which extends a previous approach from [11] and adapts it to the 2-party setting.

Minimum acceleration criterion with constraints implies bang-bang control as an underlying principle for optimal trajectories of arm reaching movements. Rapid arm-reaching movements serve as an excellent test bed for any theory about trajectory formation. How are these movements planned? A minimum acceleration criterion has been examined in the past, and the solution obtained, based on the Euler-Poisson equation, failed to predict that the hand would begin and end the movement at rest (i.e., with zero acceleration). Therefore, this criterion was rejected in favor of the minimum jerk, which was proved to be successful in describing many features of human movements. This letter follows an alternative approach and solves the minimum acceleration problem with constraints using Pontryagin's minimum principle. We use the minimum principle to obtain minimum acceleration trajectories and use the jerk as a control signal. In order to find a solution that does not include nonphysiological impulse functions, constraints on the maximum and minimum jerk values are assumed. The analytical solution provides a three-phase piecewise constant jerk signal (bang-bang control) where the magnitude of the jerk and the two switching times depend on the magnitude of the maximum and minimum available jerk values. This result fits the observed trajectories of reaching movements and takes into account both the extrinsic coordinates and the muscle limitations in a single framework. The minimum acceleration with constraints principle is discussed as a unifying approach for many observations about the neural control of movements.

Wireless Networks with RF Energy Harvesting: A Contemporary Survey Radio frequency (RF) energy transfer and harvesting techniques have recently become alternative methods to power the next generation wireless networks. As this emerging technology enables proactive energy replenishment of wireless devices, it is advantageous in supporting applications with quality of service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, we present a comprehensive literature review on the research progresses in wireless networks with RF energy harvesting capability, referred to as RF energy harvesting networks (RF-EHNs). First, we present an overview of the RF-EHNs including system architecture, RF energy harvesting techniques and existing applications. Then, we present the background in circuit design as well as the state-of-the-art circuitry implementations, and review the communication protocols specially designed for RF-EHNs. We also explore various key design issues in the development of RFEHNs according to the network types, i.e., single-hop networks, multi-antenna networks, relay networks, and cognitive radio networks. Finally, we envision some open research directions.

Automated Detection of Obstructive Sleep Apnea Events from a Single-Lead Electrocardiogram Using a Convolutional Neural Network. In this study, we propose a method for the automated detection of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) from a single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) using a convolutional neural network (CNN). A CNN model was designed with six optimized convolution layers including activation, pooling, and dropout layers. One-dimensional (1D) convolution, rectified linear units (ReLU), and max pooling were applied to the convolution, activation, and pooling layers, respectively. For training and evaluation of the CNN model, a single-lead ECG dataset was collected from 82 subjects with OSA and was divided into training (including data from 63 patients with 34,281 events) and testing (including data from 19 patients with 8571 events) datasets. Using this CNN model, a precision of 0.99%, a recall of 0.99%, and an F-score of 0.99% were attained with the training dataset; these values were all 0.96% when the CNN was applied to the testing dataset. These results show that the proposed CNN model can be used to detect OSA accurately on the basis of a single-lead ECG. Ultimately, this CNN model may be used as a screening tool for those suspected to suffer from OSA.

A Muscle Synergy-Driven ANFIS Approach to Predict Continuous Knee Joint Movement Continuous motion prediction plays a significant role in realizing seamless control of robotic exoskeletons and orthoses. Explicitly modeling the relationship between coordinated muscle activations from surface electromyography (sEMG) and human limb movements provides a new path of sEMG-based human–machine interface. Instead of the numeric features from individual channels, we propose a muscle synergy-driven adaptive network-based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) approach to predict continuous knee joint movements, in which muscle synergy reflects the motor control information to coordinate muscle activations for performing movements. Four human subjects participated in the experiment while walking at five types of speed: 2.0 km/h, 2.5 km/h, 3.0 km/h, 3.5 km/h, and 4.0 km/h. The study finds that the acquired muscle synergies associate the muscle activations with human joint movements in a low-dimensional space and have been further utilized for predicting knee joint angles. The proposed approach outperformed commonly used numeric features from individual sEMG channels with an average correlation coefficient of 0.92 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$ \pm $</tex-math></inline-formula> 0.05. Results suggest that the correlation between muscle activations and knee joint movements is captured by the muscle synergy-driven ANFIS model and can be utilized for the estimation of continuous joint angles.

Scalable Person Re-Identification: A Benchmark This paper contributes a new high quality dataset for person re-identification, named \"Market-1501\". Generally, current datasets: 1) are limited in scale, 2) consist of hand-drawn bboxes, which are unavailable under realistic settings, 3) have only one ground truth and one query image for each identity (close environment). To tackle these problems, the proposed Market-1501 dataset is featured in three aspects. First, it contains over 32,000 annotated bboxes, plus a distractor set of over 500K images, making it the largest person re-id dataset to date. Second, images in Market-1501 dataset are produced using the Deformable Part Model (DPM) as pedestrian detector. Third, our dataset is collected in an open system, where each identity has multiple images under each camera. As a minor contribution, inspired by recent advances in large-scale image search, this paper proposes an unsupervised Bag-of-Words descriptor. We view person re-identification as a special task of image search. In experiment, we show that the proposed descriptor yields competitive accuracy on VIPeR, CUHK03, and Market-1501 datasets, and is scalable on the large-scale 500k dataset.

Pose-Guided Feature Alignment for Occluded Person Re-Identification Persons are often occluded by various obstacles in person retrieval scenarios. Previous person re-identification (re-id) methods, either overlook this issue or resolve it based on an extreme assumption. To alleviate the occlusion problem, we propose to detect the occluded regions, and explicitly exclude those regions during feature generation and matching. In this paper, we introduce a novel method named Pose-Guided Feature Alignment (PGFA), exploiting pose landmarks to disentangle the useful information from the occlusion noise. During the feature constructing stage, our method utilizes human landmarks to generate attention maps. The generated attention maps indicate if a specific body part is occluded and guide our model to attend to the non-occluded regions. During matching, we explicitly partition the global feature into parts and use the pose landmarks to indicate which partial features belonging to the target person. Only the visible regions are utilized for the retrieval. Besides, we construct a large-scale dataset for the Occluded Person Re-ID problem, namely Occluded-DukeMTMC, which is by far the largest dataset for the Occlusion Person Re-ID. Extensive experiments are conducted on our constructed occluded re-id dataset, two partial re-id datasets, and two commonly used holistic re-id datasets. Our method largely outperforms existing person re-id methods on three occlusion datasets, while remains top performance on two holistic datasets.

High-Order Information Matters: Learning Relation And Topology For Occluded Person Re-Identification Occluded person re-identification (ReID) aims to match occluded person images to holistic ones across disjoint cameras. In this paper, we propose a novel framework by learning high-order relation and topology information for discriminative features and robust alignment. At first, we use a CNN backbone and a key-points estimation model to extract semantic local features. Even so, occluded images still suffer from occlusion and outliers. Then, we view the local features of an image as nodes of a graph and propose an adaptive direction graph convolutional (ADGC) layer to pass relation information between nodes. The proposed ADGC layer can automatically suppress the message passing of meaningless features by dynamically learning direction and degree of linkage. When aligning two groups of local features from two images, we view it as a graph matching problem and propose a cross-graph embedded-alignment (CGEA) layer to jointly learn and embed topology information to local features, and straightly predict similarity score. The proposed CGEA layer not only take full use of alignment learned by graph matching but also replace sensitive one-to-one matching with a robust soft one. Finally, extensive experiments on occluded, partial, and holistic ReID tasks show the effectiveness of our proposed method. Specifically, our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art by 6.5% mAP scores on Occluded-Duke dataset. Code is available at https://github.com/wangguanan/HOReID.

Perceive Where to Focus: Learning Visibility-Aware Part-Level Features for Partial Person Re-Identification This paper considers a realistic problem in person re-identification (re-ID) task, i.e., partial re-ID. Under partial re-ID scenario, the images may contain a partial observation of a pedestrian. If we directly compare a partial pedestrian image with a holistic one, the extreme spatial misalignment significantly compromises the discriminative ability of the learned representation. We propose a Visibility-aware Part Model (VPM) for partial re-ID, which learns to perceive the visibility of regions through self-supervision. The visibility awareness allows VPM to extract region-level features and compare two images with focus on their shared regions (which are visible on both images). VPM gains two-fold benefit toward higher accuracy for partial re-ID. On the one hand, compared with learning a global feature, VPM learns region-level features and thus benefits from fine-grained information. On the other hand, with visibility awareness, VPM is capable to estimate the shared regions between two images and thus suppresses the spatial misalignment. Experimental results confirm that our method significantly improves the learned feature representation and the achieved accuracy is on par with the state of the art.

Learning Context Graph For Person Search Person re-identification has achieved great progress with deep convolutional neural networks. However, most previous methods focus on learning individual appearance feature embedding, and it is hard for the models to handle difficult situations with different illumination, large pose variance and occlusion. In this work, we take a step further and consider employing context information for person search. For a probe-gallery pair, we first propose a contextual instance expansion module, which employs a relative attention module to search and filter useful context information in the scene. We also build a graph learning framework to effectively employ context pairs to update target similarity. These two modules are built on top of a joint detection and instance feature learning framework, which improves the discriminativeness of the learned features. The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely used person search datasets.

Semantic Understanding of Scenes through the ADE20K Dataset. Semantic understanding of visual scenes is one of the holy grails of computer vision. Despite efforts of the community in data collection, there are still few image datasets covering a wide range of scenes and object categories with pixel-wise annotations for scene understanding. In this work, we present a densely annotated dataset ADE20K, which spans diverse annotations of scenes, objects, parts of objects, and in some cases even parts of parts. Totally there are 25k images of the complex everyday scenes containing a variety of objects in their natural spatial context. On average there are 19.5 instances and 10.5 object classes per image. Based on ADE20K, we construct benchmarks for scene parsing and instance segmentation. We provide baseline performances on both of the benchmarks and re-implement state-of-the-art models for open source. We further evaluate the effect of synchronized batch normalization and find that a reasonably large batch size is crucial for the semantic segmentation performance. We show that the networks trained on ADE20K are able to segment a wide variety of scenes and objects.

Sean: Image Synthesis With Semantic Region-Adaptive Normalization We propose semantic region-adaptive normalization (SEAN), a simple but effective building block for Generative Adversarial Networks conditioned on segmentation masks that describe the semantic regions in the desired output image. Using SEAN normalization, we can build a network architecture that can control the style of each semantic region individually, e.g., we can specify one style reference image per region. SEAN is better suited to encode, transfer, and synthesize style than the best previous method in terms of reconstruction quality, variability, and visual quality. We evaluate SEAN on multiple datasets and report better quantitative metrics (e.g. FID, PSNR) than the current state of the art. SEAN also pushes the frontier of interactive image editing. We can interactively edit images by changing segmentation masks or the style for any given region. We can also interpolate styles from two reference images per region. Code: https: //github. com/ZPdesu/SEAN.

Deep Neighborhood Component Analysis for Visual Similarity Modeling AbstractLearning effective visual similarity is an essential problem in multimedia research. Despite the promising progress made in recent years, most existing approaches learn visual features and similarities in two separate stages, which inevitably limits their performance. Once useful information has been lost in the feature extraction stage, it can hardly be recovered later. This article proposes a novel end-to-end approach for visual similarity modeling, called deep neighborhood component analysis, which discriminatively trains deep neural networks to jointly learn visual features and similarities. Specifically, we first formulate a metric learning objective that maximizes the intra-class correlations and minimizes the inter-class correlations under the neighborhood component analysis criterion, and then train deep convolutional neural networks to learn a nonlinear mapping that projects visual instances from original feature space to a discriminative and neighborhood-structure-preserving embedding space, thus resulting in better performance. We conducted extensive evaluations on several widely used and challenging datasets, and the impressive results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

The graph neural network model. Many underlying relationships among data in several areas of science and engineering, e.g., computer vision, molecular chemistry, molecular biology, pattern recognition, and data mining, can be represented in terms of graphs. In this paper, we propose a new neural network model, called graph neural network (GNN) model, that extends existing neural network methods for processing the data represented in graph domains. This GNN model, which can directly process most of the practically useful types of graphs, e.g., acyclic, cyclic, directed, and undirected, implements a function tau(G,n) is an element of IR(m) that maps a graph G and one of its nodes n into an m-dimensional Euclidean space. A supervised learning algorithm is derived to estimate the parameters of the proposed GNN model. The computational cost of the proposed algorithm is also considered. Some experimental results are shown to validate the proposed learning algorithm, and to demonstrate its generalization capabilities.

An online mechanism for multi-unit demand and its application to plug-in hybrid electric vehicle charging We develop an online mechanism for the allocation of an expiring resource to a dynamic agent population. Each agent has a non-increasing marginal valuation function for the resource, and an upper limit on the number of units that can be allocated in any period. We propose two versions on a truthful allocation mechanism. Each modifies the decisions of a greedy online assignment algorithm by sometimes cancelling an allocation of resources. One version makes this modification immediately upon an allocation decision while a second waits until the point at which an agent departs the market. Adopting a prior-free framework, we show that the second approach has better worst-case allocative efficiency and is more scalable. On the other hand, the first approach (with immediate cancellation) may be easier in practice because it does not need to reclaim units previously allocated. We consider an application to recharging plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). Using data from a real-world trial of PHEVs in the UK, we demonstrate higher system performance than a fixed price system, performance comparable with a standard, but non-truthful scheduling heuristic, and the ability to support 50% more vehicles at the same fuel cost than a simple randomized policy.

Geometric attacks on image watermarking systems Synchronization errors can lead to significant performance loss in image watermarking methods, as the geometric attacks in the Stirmark benchmark software show. The authors describe the most common types of geometric attacks and survey proposed solutions.

iEMS for large scale charging of electric vehicles: Architecture and optimal online scheduling The problem of large scale charging of electric vehicles (EVs) is considered. An architecture for the energy management system (EMS) is proposed based on the concept of network switched charging where chargers are controlled by a scheduler that optimizes the overall operating profit of the service provider. It is assumed that the EMS has access to collocated renewable sources (e.g. solar power) and can supplement the renewable with purchased electricity from the grid. The renewable source may vary arbitrarily, and requests of all EVs accepted for service must be completed by their respective deadlines. Under a deterministic model for arbitrary arrivals, charging requests, and service deadlines, online scheduling of EV charging is formulated as a multi-processor deadline scheduling problem for which the optimal scheduler maximizes the competitive ratio against the best offline scheduler. An online scheduling algorithm, referred to as TAGS, is proposed based on the principle of threshold admission and greedy scheduling. TAGS has the complexity of O(n log n) where n is the number of EVs in the facility. It is shown that, when the price offered to the EV customers is higher than the purchasing price of electricity from the grid, TAGS achieves the competitive ratio of 1. Otherwise, TAGS achieves the maximum competitive ratio given by the inverse of a real root of a certain polynomial. Simulations are used to evaluate the performance of TAGS against standard benchmarks and for the setting of optimal charging price.

Particle swarm optimization algorithm: an overview. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a population-based stochastic optimization algorithm motivated by intelligent collective behavior of some animals such as flocks of birds or schools of fish. Since presented in 1995, it has experienced a multitude of enhancements. As researchers have learned about the technique, they derived new versions aiming to different demands, developed new applications in a host of areas, published theoretical studies of the effects of the various parameters and proposed many variants of the algorithm. This paper introduces its origin and background and carries out the theory analysis of the PSO. Then, we analyze its present situation of research and application in algorithm structure, parameter selection, topology structure, discrete PSO algorithm and parallel PSO algorithm, multi-objective optimization PSO and its engineering applications. Finally, the existing problems are analyzed and future research directions are presented.

Intention-detection strategies for upper limb exosuits: model-based myoelectric vs dynamic-based control The cognitive human-robot interaction between an exosuit and its wearer plays a key role in determining both the biomechanical effects of the device on movements and its perceived effectiveness. There is a lack of evidence, however, on the comparative performance of different control methods, implemented on the same device. Here, we compare two different control approaches on the same robotic suit: a model-based myoelectric control (myoprocessor), which estimates the joint torque from the activation of target muscles, and a dynamic-based control that provides support against gravity using an inverse dynamic model. Tested on a cohort of four healthy participants, assistance from the exosuit results in a marked reduction in the effort of muscles working against gravity with both control approaches (peak reduction of 68.6±18.8%, for the dynamic arm model and 62.4±25.1% for the myoprocessor), when compared to an unpowered condition. Neither of the two controllers had an affect on the performance of their users in a joint-angle tracking task (peak errors of 15.4° and 16.4° for the dynamic arm model and myoprocessor, respectively, compared to 13.1o in the unpowered condition). However, our results highlight the remarkable adaptability of the myoprocessor to seamlessly adapt to changing external dynamics.

The Representation of Virtual Reality in Education Students' opinions about the opportunities and the implications of VR in instruction were investigated by administering a questionnaire to humanities and engineering undergraduates. The questionnaire invited participants to rate a series of statements concerning motivation and emotion, skills, cognitive styles, benefits and learning outcomes associated with the use of VR in education. The representation which emerged was internally consistent and articulated into specific dimensions. It was not affected by gender, by the previous use of VR software, or by the knowledge of the main topics concerning the introduction of IT in instruction. Also the direct participation in a training session based on an immersive VR experience did not influence such a representation, which was partially modulated by the kind of course attended by students.

A Comparative Study of Distributed Learning Environments on Learning Outcomes Advances in information and communication technologies have fueled rapid growth in the popularity of technology-supported distributed learning (DL). Many educational institutions, both academic and corporate, have undertaken initiatives that leverage the myriad of available DL technologies. Despite their rapid growth in popularity, however, alternative technologies for DL are seldom systematically evaluated for learning efficacy. Considering the increasing range of information and communication technologies available for the development of DL environments, we believe it is paramount for studies to compare the relative learning outcomes of various technologies.In this research, we employed a quasi-experimental field study approach to investigate the relative learning effectiveness of two collaborative DL environments in the context of an executive development program. We also adopted a framework of hierarchical characteristics of group support system (GSS) technologies, outlined by DeSanctis and Gallupe (1987), as the basis for characterizing the two DL environments.One DL environment employed a simple e-mail and listserv capability while the other used a sophisticated GSS (herein referred to as Beta system). Interestingly, the learning outcome of the e-mail environment was higher than the learning outcome of the more sophisticated GSS environment. The post-hoc analysis of the electronic messages indicated that the students in groups using the e-mail system exchanged a higher percentage of messages related to the learning task. The Beta system users exchanged a higher level of technology sense-making messages. No significant difference was observed in the students' satisfaction with the learning process under the two DL environments.

The effects of instructional support and learner interests when learning using computer simulations Within the scope of this study, the effectiveness of two kinds of instructional support was evaluated with regard to the learner's interests. Two versions of a simulation program about the respiratory chain were developed, differing only in the kind of tasks provided for instructional support: One version contained problem-solving tasks, the other one contained worked-out examples. The focus was on the learner's interest in the subject and in computers. The first goal of the study was to find to what extent computer simulations incorporating the different kinds of instructional support have positive effects on situational subject-interest. The second goal was to evaluate the interactions between the learner's interests and the instructional support with regard to the learning results (subdivided into factual knowledge and understanding). Simulations with worked-out examples were shown to have positive effects on the learner's situational interest in the subject. This was not found to be the case in simulations with problem-solving tasks. Regardless of the kind of instructional support, learners with little interest in the subject were able to achieve significant gains in factual knowledge. However, improvement in understanding was dependent on the kind of instructional support.

Understanding the MOOCs continuance: The role of openness and reputation. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are classes delivered in an online environment with several features that are different from previous approaches to online education. The effectiveness of MOOCs is an open question as completion rates are substantially less than traditional online education courses. The objective of this study is to identify factors that enhance an individual' intention to continue using MOOCs, which a limited amount of research has previously explored. A research model based on the information systems continuance expectation-confirmation model is proposed and tested with data collected in a large-scale study. The research model explained a substantial percentage of the variance for the intention to continue using MOOCs, which is significantly influenced by perceived reputation, perceived openness, perceived usefulness, perceived, and user satisfaction. Perceived reputation and perceived openness were the strongest predictors and have not previously been examined in the context of MOOCs.

Beat the Fear of Public Speaking: Mobile 360° Video Virtual Reality Exposure Training in Home Environment Reduces Public Speaking Anxiety. With this article, we aim to increase our understanding of how mobile virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) can help reduce speaking anxiety. Using the results of a longitudinal study, we examined the effect of a new VRET strategy (Public Speech Trainer, PST), that incorporates 360 degrees live recorded VR environments, on the reduction of public speaking anxiety. The PST was developed as a 360 degrees smartphone application for a VR head-mounted device that participants could use at home. Realistic anxiety experiences were created by means of live 360 degrees video recordings of a lecture hall containing three training sessions based on graded exposure framework; empty classroom (a) and with a small (b) and large audience (c). Thirty-five students participated in all sessions using PST. Anxiety levels were measured before and after each session over a period of 4 weeks. As expected, speaking anxiety significantly decreased after the completion of all PST sessions, and the decrement was the strongest in participants with initially high speaking anxiety baseline levels. Results also revealed that participants with moderate and high speaking anxiety baseline level differ in the anxiety state pattern over time. Conclusively and in line with habituation theory, the results supported the notion that VRET is more effective when aimed at reducing high-state anxiety levels. Further implications for future research and improvement of current VRET strategies are discussed.

Motivational and cognitive benefits of training in immersive virtual reality based on multiple assessments The main objective of this study was to examine the effectiveness of immersive virtual reality (VR) as a medium for delivering laboratory safety training. We specifically compare an immersive VR simulation, a desktop VR simulation, and a conventional safety manual. The sample included 105 first year undergraduate engineering students (56 females). We include five types of learning outcomes including post-test enjoyment ratings; pre- to post-test changes in intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy; a post-test multiple choice retention test; and two behavioral transfer tests. Results indicated that the groups did not differ on the immediate retention test, suggesting that all three media were equivalent in conveying the basic knowledge. However, significant differences were observed favoring the immersive VR group compared to the text group on the two transfer tests involving the solving problems in a physical lab setting (d = 0.54, d = 0.57), as well as enjoyment (d = 1.44) and increases in intrinsic motivation (d = 0.69) and self-efficacy (d = 0.60). The desktop VR group scored significantly higher than the text group on one transfer test (d = 0.63) but not the other (d= 0.11), as well as enjoyment (d =1.11) and intrinsic motivation (d =0.83).

Virtual and augmented reality effects on K-12, higher and tertiary education students’ twenty-first century skills The purpose of this review article is to present state-of-the-art approaches and examples of virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR) systems, applications and experiences which improve student learning and the generalization of skills to the real world. Thus, we provide a brief, representative and non-exhaustive review of the current research studies, in order to examine the effects, as well as the impact of VR/AR technologies on K-12, higher and tertiary education students’ twenty-first century skills and their overall learning. According to the literature, there are promising results indicating that VR/AR environments improve learning outcomes and present numerous advantages of investing time and financial resources in K-12, higher and tertiary educational settings. Technological tools such as VR/AR improve digital-age literacy, creative thinking, communication, collaboration and problem solving ability, which constitute the so-called twenty-first century skills, necessary to transform information rather than just receive it. VR/AR enhances traditional curricula in order to enable diverse learning needs of students. Research and development relative to VR/AR technology is focused on a whole ecosystem around smart phones, including applications and educational content, games and social networks, creating immersive three-dimensional spatial experiences addressing new ways of human–computer interaction. Raising the level of engagement, promoting self-learning, enabling multi-sensory learning, enhancing spatial ability, confidence and enjoyment, promoting student-centered technology, combination of virtual and real objects in a real setting and decreasing cognitive load are some of the pedagogical advantages discussed. Additionally, implications of a growing VR/AR industry investment in educational sector are provided. It can be concluded that despite the fact that there are various barriers and challenges in front of the adoption of virtual reality on educational practices, VR/AR applications provide an effective tool to enhance learning and memory, as they provide immersed multimodal environments enriched by multiple sensory features.

Constrained Kalman filtering for indoor localization of transport vehicles using floor-installed HF RFID transponders Localization of transport vehicles is an important issue for many intralogistics applications. The paper presents an inexpensive solution for indoor localization of vehicles. Global localization is realized by detection of RFID transponders, which are integrated in the floor. The paper presents a novel algorithm for fusing RFID readings with odometry using Constraint Kalman filtering. The paper presents experimental results with a Mecanum based omnidirectional vehicle on a NaviFloor® installation, which includes passive HF RFID transponders. The experiments show that the proposed Constraint Kalman filter provides a similar localization accuracy compared to a Particle filter but with much lower computational expense.

Reliable Computation Offloading for Edge-Computing-Enabled Software-Defined IoV Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has drawn great interest recent years. Various IoV applications have emerged for improving the safety, efficiency, and comfort on the road. Cloud computing constitutes a popular technique for supporting delay-tolerant entertainment applications. However, for advanced latency-sensitive applications (e.g., auto/assisted driving and emergency failure management), cloud computing may result in excessive delay. Edge computing, which extends computing and storage capabilities to the edge of the network, emerges as an attractive technology. Therefore, to support these computationally intensive and latency-sensitive applications in IoVs, in this article, we integrate mobile-edge computing nodes (i.e., mobile vehicles) and fixed edge computing nodes (i.e., fixed road infrastructures) to provide low-latency computing services cooperatively. For better exploiting these heterogeneous edge computing resources, the concept of software-defined networking (SDN) and edge-computing-aided IoV (EC-SDIoV) is conceived. Moreover, in a complex and dynamic IoV environment, the outage of both processing nodes and communication links becomes inevitable, which may have life-threatening consequences. In order to ensure the completion with high reliability of latency-sensitive IoV services, we introduce both partial computation offloading and reliable task allocation with the reprocessing mechanism to EC-SDIoV. Since the optimization problem is nonconvex and NP-hard, a heuristic algorithm, fault-tolerant particle swarm optimization algorithm is designed for maximizing the reliability (FPSO-MR) with latency constraints. Performance evaluation results validate that the proposed scheme is indeed capable of reducing the latency as well as improving the reliability of the EC-SDIoV.

Trust in Automation: Designing for Appropriate Reliance. Automation is often problematic because people fail to rely upon it appropriately. Because people respond to technology socially, trust influences reliance on automation. In particular, trust guides reliance when complexity and unanticipated situations make a complete understanding of the automation impractical. This review considers trust from the organizational, sociological, interpersonal, psychological, and neurological perspectives. It considers how the context, automation characteristics, and cognitive processes affect the appropriateness of trust. The context in which the automation is used influences automation performance and provides a goal-oriented perspective to assess automation characteristics along a dimension of attributional abstraction. These characteristics can influence trust through analytic, analogical, and affective processes. The challenges of extrapolating the concept of trust in people to trust in automation are discussed. A conceptual model integrates research regarding trust in automation and describes the dynamics of trust, the role of context, and the influence of display characteristics. Actual or potential applications of this research include improved designs of systems that require people to manage imperfect automation.

A Model for Understanding How Virtual Reality Aids Complex Conceptual Learning Designers and evaluators of immersive virtual reality systems have many ideas concerning how virtual reality can facilitate learning. However, we have little information concerning which of virtual reality's features provide the most leverage for enhancing understanding or how to customize those affordances for different learning environments. In part, this reflects the truly complex nature of learning. Features of a learning environment do not act in isolation; other factors such as the concepts or skills to be learned, individual characteristics, the learning experience, and the interaction experience all play a role in shaping the learning process and its outcomes. Through Project Science Space, we have been trying to identify, use, and evaluate immersive virtual reality's affordances as a means to facilitate the mastery of complex, abstract concepts. In doing so, we are beginning to understand the interplay between virtual reality's features and other important factors in shaping the learning process and learning outcomes for this type of material. In this paper, we present a general model that describes how we think these factors work together and discuss some of the lessons we are learning about virtual reality's affordances in the context of this model for complex conceptual learning.

Cost-Effective Authentic and Anonymous Data Sharing with Forward Security Data sharing has never been easier with the advances of cloud computing, and an accurate analysis on the shared data provides an array of benefits to both the society and individuals. Data sharing with a large number of participants must take into account several issues, including efficiency, data integrity and privacy of data owner. Ring signature is a promising candidate to construct an anonymous and authentic data sharing system. It allows a data owner to anonymously authenticate his data which can be put into the cloud for storage or analysis purpose. Yet the costly certificate verification in the traditional public key infrastructure (PKI) setting becomes a bottleneck for this solution to be scalable. Identity-based (ID-based) ring signature, which eliminates the process of certificate verification, can be used instead. In this paper, we further enhance the security of ID-based ring signature by providing forward security: If a secret key of any user has been compromised, all previous generated signatures that include this user still remain valid. This property is especially important to any large scale data sharing system, as it is impossible to ask all data owners to reauthenticate their data even if a secret key of one single user has been compromised. We provide a concrete and efficient instantiation of our scheme, prove its security and provide an implementation to show its practicality.

Distributed Kalman consensus filter with event-triggered communication: Formulation and stability analysis. •The problem of distributed state estimation in sensor networks with event-triggered communication schedules on both sensor-to-estimator channel and estimator-to-estimator channel is studied.•An event-triggered KCF is designed by deriving the optimal Kalman gain matrix which minimizes the mean squared error.•A computational scalable form of the proposed filter is presented by some approximations.•An appropriate choice of the consensus gain matrix is provided to ensure the stochastic stability of the proposed filter.

Learning Feature Recovery Transformer for Occluded Person Re-Identification One major issue that challenges person re-identification (Re-ID) is the ubiquitous occlusion over the captured persons. There are two main challenges for the occluded person Re-ID problem, i.e., the interference of noise during feature matching and the loss of pedestrian information brought by the occlusions. In this paper, we propose a new approach called Feature Recovery Transformer (FRT) to address the two challenges simultaneously, which mainly consists of visibility graph matching and feature recovery transformer. To reduce the interference of the noise during feature matching, we mainly focus on visible regions that appear in both images and develop a visibility graph to calculate the similarity. In terms of the second challenge, based on the developed graph similarity, for each query image, we propose a recovery transformer that exploits the feature sets of its k-nearest neighbors in the gallery to recover the complete features. Extensive experiments across different person Re-ID datasets, including occluded, partial and holistic datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of FRT. Specifically, FRT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art results by at least 6.2% Rank- 1 accuracy and 7.2% mAP scores on the challenging Occluded-Duke dataset.

Explaining Classifications For Individual Instances We present a method for explaining predictions for individual instances. The presented approach is general and can be used with all classification models that output probabilities. It is based on the decomposition of a model's predictions on individual contributions of each attribute. Our method works for the so-called black box models such as support vector machines, neural networks, and nearest neighbor algorithms, as well as for ensemble methods such as boosting and random forests. We demonstrate that the generated explanations closely follow the learned models and present a visualization technique that shows the utility of our approach and enables the comparison of different prediction methods.

Contact personalization using a score understanding method This paper presents a method to interpret the output of a classification (or regression) model. The interpretation is based on two concepts: the variable importance and the value importance of the variable. Unlike most of the state of art interpretation methods, our approach allows the interpretation of the model output for every instance. Understanding the score given by a model for one instance can for example lead to an immediate decision in a customer relational management (CRM) system. Moreover the proposed method does not depend on a particular model and is therefore usable for any model or software used to produce the scores.

Image saliency: From intrinsic to extrinsic context We propose a novel framework for automatic saliency estimation in natural images. We consider saliency to be an anomaly with respect to a given context that can be global or local. In the case of global context, we estimate saliency in the whole image relative to a large dictionary of images. Unlike in some prior methods, this dictionary is not annotated, i.e., saliency is assumed unknown. In the case of local context, we partition the image into patches and estimate saliency in each patch relative to a large dictionary of un-annotated patches from the rest of the image. We propose a unified framework that applies to both cases in three steps. First, given an input (image or patch) we extract k nearest neighbors from the dictionary. Then, we geometrically warp each neighbor to match the input. Finally, we derive the saliency map from the mean absolute error between the input and all its warped neighbors. This algorithm is not only easy to implement but also outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Latent Space Expanded Variational Autoencoder For Sentence Generation Sentence generation is a key task in many natural language processing systems. Models based on a variational autoencoder (VAE) can generate plausible sentences from a continuous latent space. However, the VAE forces the latent distribution of each input sentence to match the same prior, which results in a large overlap among the latent subspaces of different sentences and a limited informative latent space. Therefore, the sentences generated by sampling from a subspace may have little correlation with the corresponding input, and the latent space cannot capture rich useful information from the input sentences, which leads to the failure of the model to generate diverse sentences from the latent space. Additionally, the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence collapse problem makes the VAE notoriously difficult to train. In this paper, a latent space expanded VAE (LSE-VAE) model is presented for sentence generation. The model maps each sentence to a continuous latent subspace under the constraint of its own prior distribution, and constrains nearby sentences to map to nearby subspaces. Sentences are dispersed to a large continuous latent space according to sentence similarity, where the latent subspaces of different sentences may be relatively far away from each other and arranged in an orderly manner. The experimental results show that the LSE-VAE improves the reconstruction ability of the VAE, generates plausible and more diverse sentences, and learns a larger informative latent space than the VAE with the properties of continuity and smoothness. The LSE-VAE does not suffer from the KL collapse problem, and it is robust to hyperparameters and much easier to train.

Diversity in Machine Learning. Machine learning methods have achieved good performance and been widely applied in various real-world applications. They can learn the model adaptively and be better fit for special requirements of different tasks. Generally, a good machine learning system is composed of plentiful training data, a good model training process, and an accurate inference. Many factors can affect the performance of the machine learning process, among which the diversity of the machine learning process is an important one. The diversity can help each procedure to guarantee a totally good machine learning: diversity of the training data ensures that the training data can provide more discriminative information for the model, diversity of the learned model (diversity in parameters of each model or diversity among different base models) makes each parameter/model capture unique or complement information and the diversity in inference can provide multiple choices each of which corresponds to a specific plausible local optimal result. Even though diversity plays an important role in the machine learning process, there is no systematical analysis of the diversification in the machine learning system. In this paper, we systematically summarize the methods to make data diversification, model diversification, and inference diversification in the machine learning process. In addition, the typical applications where the diversity technology improved the machine learning performance have been surveyed including the remote sensing imaging tasks, machine translation, camera relocalization, image segmentation, object detection, topic modeling, and others. Finally, we discuss some challenges of the diversity technology in machine learning and point out some directions in future work. Our analysis provides a deeper understanding of the diversity technology in machine learning tasks and hence can help design and learn more effective models for real-world applications.

Conditional Random Fields as Recurrent Neural Networks. Pixel-level labelling tasks, such as semantic segmentation, play a central role in image understanding. Recent approaches have attempted to harness the capabilities of deep learning techniques for image recognition to tackle pixel-level labelling tasks. One central issue in this methodology is the limited capacity of deep learning techniques to delineate visual objects. To solve this problem, we introduce a new form of convolutional neural network that combines the strengths of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Conditional Random Fields (CRFs)-based probabilistic graphical modelling. To this end, we formulate Conditional Random Fields with Gaussian pairwise potentials and mean-field approximate inference as Recurrent Neural Networks. This network, called CRF-RNN, is then plugged in as a part of a CNN to obtain a deep network that has desirable properties of both CNNs and CRFs. Importantly, our system fully integrates CRF modelling with CNNs, making it possible to train the whole deep network end-to-end with the usual back-propagation algorithm, avoiding offline post-processing methods for object delineation. We apply the proposed method to the problem of semantic image segmentation, obtaining top results on the challenging Pascal VOC 2012 segmentation benchmark.

A threshold of ln n for approximating set cover Given a collection F of subsets of S ={1,…,n}, setcover is the problem of selecting as few as possiblesubsets from F such that their union coversS,, and maxk-cover is the problem of selectingk subsets from F such that their union has maximum cardinality. Both these problems areNP-hard. We prove that (1 - o(1)) lnn is a threshold below which setcover cannot be approximated efficiently, unless NP has slightlysuperpolynomial time algorithms. This closes the gap (up to low-orderterms) between the ratio of approximation achievable by the greedyalogorithm (which is (1 - o(1)) lnn), and provious results of Lund and Yanakakis, that showed hardness ofapproximation within a ratio of log2n/2&sime;0.72 ln n. For maxk-cover, we show an approximationthreshold of (1 - 1/e)(up tolow-order terms), under assumption that P≠NP.

Predicting Reduced Driver Alertness on Monotonous Highways Impaired driver alertness increases the likelihood of a driver making mistakes and reacting too late to unexpected events. This is a particular concern on monotonous roads, where a drivers attention can decrease rapidly. Although effective countermeasures dont currently exist, the development of in-vehicle sensors opens avenues for monitoring driving behavior in real time. The aim of this study is to predict driver alertness levels using surrogate measures collected from in-vehicle sensors. Electroencephalographic activity is used as a reference to evaluate alertness. Based on a sample of 25 drivers, the authors collected data in a driving simulator instrumented with an eye-tracking system, a heart-rate monitor, and an electrodermal activity device. They tested various classification models, from linear regressions to Bayesians and data mining techniques. Results indicate that neural networks were the most efficient model for detecting lapses in alertness. Findings also show that reduced alertness can be predicted up to five minutes in advance with 90 percent accuracy using surrogate measures such as time to line crossing, blink frequency, and skin conductance level. Such a method could be used to warn drivers of their alertness levels through the development of an in-vehicle device that monitors, in real time, driver behavior on highways.

Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks In recent years, supervised learning with convolutional networks (CNNs) has seen huge adoption in computer vision applications. Comparatively, unsupervised learning with CNNs has received less attention. In this work we hope to help bridge the gap between the success of CNNs for supervised learning and unsupervised learning. We introduce a class of CNNs called deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (DCGANs), that have certain architectural constraints, and demonstrate that they are a strong candidate for unsupervised learning. Training on various image datasets, we show convincing evidence that our deep convolutional adversarial pair learns a hierarchy of representations from object parts to scenes in both the generator and discriminator. Additionally, we use the learned features for novel tasks - demonstrating their applicability as general image representations.

Hierarchical mesh segmentation based on fitting primitives In this paper, we describe a hierarchical face clustering algorithm for triangle meshes based on fitting primitives belonging to an arbitrary set. The method proposed is completely automatic, and generates a binary tree of clusters, each of which is fitted by one of the primitives employed. Initially, each triangle represents a single cluster; at every iteration, all the pairs of adjacent clusters are considered, and the one that can be better approximated by one of the primitives forms a new single cluster. The approximation error is evaluated using the same metric for all the primitives, so that it makes sense to choose which is the most suitable primitive to approximate the set of triangles in a cluster.Based on this approach, we have implemented a prototype that uses planes, spheres and cylinders, and have experimented that for meshes made of 100 K faces, the whole binary tree of clusters can be built in about 8 s on a standard PC.The framework described here has natural application in reverse engineering processes, but it has also been tested for surface denoising, feature recovery and character skinning.

A constructive hybrid structure optimization methodology for radial basis probabilistic neural networks. In this paper, a novel heuristic structure optimization methodology for radial basis probabilistic neural networks (RBPNNs) is proposed. First, a minimum volume covering hyperspheres (MVCH) algorithm is proposed to select the initial hidden-layer centers of the RBPNN, and then the recursive orthogonal least square algorithm (ROLSA) combined with the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is adopted to further optimize the initial structure of the RBPNN. The proposed algorithms are evaluated through eight benchmark classification problems and two real-world application problems, a plant species identification task involving 50 plant species and a palmprint recognition task. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm is feasible and efficient for the structure optimization of the RBPNN. The RBPNN achieves higher recognition rates and better classification efficiency than multilayer perceptron networks (MLPNs) and radial basis function neural networks (RBFNNs) in both tasks. Moreover, the experimental results illustrated that the generalization performance of the optimized RBPNN in the plant species identification task was markedly better than that of the optimized RBFNN.

An FES-assisted training strategy combined with impedance control for a lower limb rehabilitation robot In order to investigate the feasibility of integrating functional electrical stimulation (FES) with robot-based rehabilitation training, this paper proposes an FES-assisted training strategy combined with impedance control for our self-made exoskeleton lower limb rehabilitation robot. This control strategy is carried out in a leg press task. Through impedance control, an active compliance of the robot is established, and the patient's voluntary effort to accomplish the task is inspired. During the training process, the patient's related muscles are applied with FES which provides an extra assistance to the patient. The intensity of the FES is properly chosen aiming to induce a desired active torque which is proportional to the voluntary effort of the patient. This kind of enhancement serves as a positive feedback which reminds the patient of the correct attempt to fulfill the desired motion. FES control is conducted by a combination of neural network-based feedforward controller and a PD feedback controller. The feasibility of this control strategy has been verified in Matlab.

Flymap: Interacting With Maps Projected From A Drone Interactive maps have become ubiquitous in our daily lives, helping us reach destinations and discovering our surroundings. Yet, designing map interactions is not straightforward and depends on the device being used. As mobile devices evolve and become independent from users, such as with robots and drones, how will we interact with the maps they provide? We propose FlyMap as a novel user experience for drone-based interactive maps. We designed and developed three interaction techniques for FlyMap's usage scenarios. In a comprehensive indoor study (N = 16), we show the strengths and weaknesses of two techniques on users' cognition, task load, and satisfaction. FlyMap was then pilot tested with the third technique outdoors in real world conditions with four groups of participants (N = 13). We show that FlyMap's interactivity is exciting to users and opens the space for more direct interactions with drones.

Social Robots for (Second) Language Learning in (Migrant) Primary School Children Especially these days, innovation and support from technology to relieve pressure in education is highly urgent. This study tested the potential advantage of a social robot over a tablet in (second) language learning on performance, engagement, and enjoyment. Shortages in primary education call for new technology solutions. Previous studies combined robots with tablets, to compensate for robot’s limitations, however, this study applied direct human–robot interaction. Primary school children (N = 63, aged 4–6) participated in a 3-wave field experiment with story-telling exercises, either with a semi-autonomous robot (without tablet, using WOz) or a tablet. Results showed increased learning gains over time when training with a social robot, compared to the tablet. Children who trained with a robot were more engaged in the story-telling task and enjoyed it more. Robot’s behavioral style (social or neutral) hardly differed overall, however, seems to vary for high versus low educational abilities. While social robots need sophistication before being implemented in schools, our study shows the potential of social robots as tutors in (second) language learning.

Robust Federated Opportunistic Learning in the Presence of Label Quality Disparity In this article, the problem of federated learning (FL) in the presence of label quality disparity is considered. To address this problem, the federated opportunistic computing for ubiquitous system (FOCUS) has been proposed very recently. In FOCUS, the central server utilizes its accurately labeled benchmark samples to quantify the credibility of different clients by computing the cross-entropy (CE) loss of the locally updated models on the benchmark data set and the CE loss of the global model on the local data sets. However, FOCUS assumes the availability of the accurate labels of the benchmark data set, which is difficult to guarantee under many practical scenarios. To overcome this limitation of FOCUS, we propose a new algorithm named robust federated opportunistic learning (RFOL), which does not require the benchmark samples at the central server to be labeled. In RFOL, the client credibility is evaluated by computing the Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence among the soft predictions on the benchmark samples of different locally updated models and the CE loss of the global model on the local data sets. The experimental results on several popular data sets reveal that: 1) with an unlabeled benchmark data set at the server, the proposed RFOL algorithm attains almost the same learning performance as FOCUS, which requires an accurately labeled benchmark data set at the server; 2) with an inaccurately labeled benchmark data set, RFOL outperforms FOCUS, which shows that the former is more robust to the inaccurate labels of the benchmark samples; and 3) RFOL outperforms FedAvg, which assigns equal credibility to all the clients.

The Sybil Attack Large-scale peer-to-peer systems facesecurity threats from faulty or hostile remotecomputing elements. To resist these threats, manysuch systems employ redundancy. However, if asingle faulty entity can present multiple identities,it can control a substantial fraction of the system,thereby undermining this redundancy. Oneapproach to preventing these &quot;Sybil attacks&quot; is tohave a trusted agency certify identities. Thispaper shows that, without a logically centralizedauthority, Sybil...

BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation Human evaluations of machine translation are extensive but expensive. Human evaluations can take months to finish and involve human labor that can not be reused. We propose a method of automatic machine translation evaluation that is quick, inexpensive, and language-independent, that correlates highly with human evaluation, and that has little marginal cost per run. We present this method as an automated understudy to skilled human judges which substitutes for them when there is need for quick or frequent evaluations.

Computational thinking Summary form only given. My vision for the 21st century, Computational Thinking, will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

Fuzzy logic in control systems: fuzzy logic controller. I.

Switching between stabilizing controllers This paper deals with the problem of switching between several linear time-invariant (LTI) controllers—all of them capable of stabilizing a speci4c LTI process—in such a way that the stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed for any switching sequence. We show that it is possible to 4nd realizations for any given family of controller transfer matrices so that the closed-loop system remains stable, no matter how we switch among the controller. The motivation for this problem is the control of complex systems where con8icting requirements make a single LTI controller unsuitable. ? 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

Tabu Search - Part I

Bidirectional recurrent neural networks In the first part of this paper, a regular recurrent neural network (RNN) is extended to a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN). The BRNN can be trained without the limitation of using input information just up to a preset future frame. This is accomplished by training it simultaneously in positive and negative time direction. Structure and training procedure of the proposed network are explained. In regression and classification experiments on artificial data, the proposed structure gives better results than other approaches. For real data, classification experiments for phonemes from the TIMIT database show the same tendency. In the second part of this paper, it is shown how the proposed bidirectional structure can be easily modified to allow efficient estimation of the conditional posterior probability of complete symbol sequences without making any explicit assumption about the shape of the distribution. For this part, experiments on real data are reported

An intensive survey of fair non-repudiation protocols With the phenomenal growth of the Internet and open networks in general, security services, such as non-repudiation, become crucial to many applications. Non-repudiation services must ensure that when Alice sends some information to Bob over a network, neither Alice nor Bob can deny having participated in a part or the whole of this communication. Therefore a fair non-repudiation protocol has to generate non-repudiation of origin evidences intended to Bob, and non-repudiation of receipt evidences destined to Alice. In this paper, we clearly define the properties a fair non-repudiation protocol must respect, and give a survey of the most important non-repudiation protocols without and with trusted third party (TTP). For the later ones we discuss the evolution of the TTP's involvement and, between others, describe the most recent protocol using a transparent TTP. We also discuss some ad-hoc problems related to the management of non-repudiation evidences.

Dynamic movement and positioning of embodied agents in multiparty conversations For embodied agents to engage in realistic multiparty conversation, they must stand in appropriate places with respect to other agents and the environment. When these factors change, such as an agent joining the conversation, the agents must dynamically move to a new location and/or orientation to accommodate. This paper presents an algorithm for simulating movement of agents based on observed human behavior using techniques developed for pedestrian movement in crowd simulations. We extend a previous group conversation simulation to include an agent motion algorithm. We examine several test cases and show how the simulation generates results that mirror real-life conversation settings.

An improved genetic algorithm with conditional genetic operators and its application to set-covering problem The genetic algorithm (GA) is a popular, biologically inspired optimization method. However, in the GA there is no rule of thumb to design the GA operators and select GA parameters. Instead, trial-and-error has to be applied. In this paper we present an improved genetic algorithm in which crossover and mutation are performed conditionally instead of probability. Because there are no crossover rate and mutation rate to be selected, the proposed improved GA can be more easily applied to a problem than the conventional genetic algorithms. The proposed improved genetic algorithm is applied to solve the set-covering problem. Experimental studies show that the improved GA produces better results over the conventional one and other methods.

Lane-level traffic estimations using microscopic traffic variables This paper proposes a novel inference method to estimate lane-level traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time on road segments where local information could not be measured and assessed directly. The main contributions of the proposed method are 1) the ability to perform lane-level estimations of traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time and 2) the ability to adapt to different traffic regimes by assessing only microscopic traffic variables. We propose a modified Kriging estimation model which explicitly takes into account both spatial and temporal variability. Performance evaluations are conducted using real-world data under different traffic regimes and it is shown that the proposed method outperforms a Kalman filter-based approach.

Convolutional Neural Network-Based Classification of Driver's Emotion during Aggressive and Smooth Driving Using Multi-Modal Camera Sensors. Because aggressive driving often causes large-scale loss of life and property, techniques for advance detection of adverse driver emotional states have become important for the prevention of aggressive driving behaviors. Previous studies have primarily focused on systems for detecting aggressive driver emotion via smart-phone accelerometers and gyro-sensors, or they focused on methods of detecting physiological signals using electroencephalography (EEG) or electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors. Because EEG and ECG sensors cause discomfort to drivers and can be detached from the driver's body, it becomes difficult to focus on bio-signals to determine their emotional state. Gyro-sensors and accelerometers depend on the performance of GPS receivers and cannot be used in areas where GPS signals are blocked. Moreover, if driving on a mountain road with many quick turns, a driver's emotional state can easily be misrecognized as that of an aggressive driver. To resolve these problems, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method of detecting emotion to identify aggressive driving using input images of the driver's face, obtained using near-infrared (NIR) light and thermal camera sensors. In this research, we conducted an experiment using our own database, which provides a high classification accuracy for detecting driver emotion leading to either aggressive or smooth (i.e., relaxed) driving. Our proposed method demonstrates better performance than existing methods.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

VISION: a video and image dataset for source identification. Forensic research community keeps proposing new techniques to analyze digital images and videos. However, the performance of proposed tools are usually tested on data that are far from reality in terms of resolution, source device, and processing history. Remarkably, in the latest years, portable devices became the preferred means to capture images and videos, and contents are commonly shared through social media platforms (SMPs, for example, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). These facts pose new challenges to the forensic community: for example, most modern cameras feature digital stabilization, that is proved to severely hinder the performance of video source identification technologies; moreover, the strong re-compression enforced by SMPs during upload threatens the reliability of multimedia forensic tools. On the other hand, portable devices capture both images and videos with the same sensor, opening new forensic opportunities. The goal of this paper is to propose the VISION dataset as a contribution to the development of multimedia forensics. The VISION dataset is currently composed by 34,427 images and 1914 videos, both in the native format and in their social version (Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp are considered), from 35 portable devices of 11 major brands. VISION can be exploited as benchmark for the exhaustive evaluation of several image and video forensic tools.

Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition High-resolution representations are essential for position-sensitive vision problems, such as human pose estimation, semantic segmentation, and object detection. Existing state-of-the-art frameworks first encode the input image as a low-resolution representation through a subnetwork that is formed by connecting high-to-low resolution convolutions in series (e.g., ResNet, VGGNet), ...

IMD2020: A Large-Scale Annotated Dataset Tailored for Detecting Manipulated Images Witnessing impressive results of deep nets in a number of computer vision problems, the image forensic community has begun to utilize them in the challenging domain of detecting manipulated visual content. One of the obstacles to replicate the success of deep nets here is absence of diverse datasets tailored for training and testing of image forensic methods. Such datasets need to be designed to capture wide and complex types of systematic noise and intrinsic artifacts of images in order to avoid overfitting of learning methods to just a narrow set of camera types or types of manipulations. These artifacts are brought into visual content by various components of the image acquisition process as well as the manipulating process.In this paper, we introduce two novel datasets. First, we identified the majority of camera brands and models on the market, which resulted in 2,322 camera models. Then, we collected a dataset of 35,000 real images captured by these camera models. Moreover, we also created the same number of digitally manipulated images by using a large variety of core image manipulation methods as well we advanced ones such as GAN or Inpainting resulting in a dataset of 70,000 images. In addition to this dataset, we also created a dataset of 2,000 "real-life" (uncontrolled) manipulated images. They are made by unknown people and downloaded from Internet. The real versions of these images also have been found and are provided. We also manually created binary masks localizing the exact manipulated areas of these images. Both datasets are publicly available for the research community at http://staff.utia.cas.cz/novozada/db.

Sequential and Patch Analyses for Object Removal Video Forgery Detection and Localization In recent years, video surveillance has become essential for security applications used to monitor many organizations and locations, and it is therefore important to ensure the reliability of these surveillance videos. Unfortunately, surveillance videos can be forged with little effort by deleting an object from a video scene while leaving no visible traces. A fundamental challenge in video security is to determine whether or not an object has been removed from a video. This task is particularly challenging due to the lack of ground truth bases that can be used to verify the originality and integrity of video contents. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on sequential and patch analyses to detect object removal forgery and to localize forged regions in videos. Sequential analysis is performed by modeling video sequences as stochastic processes, where changes in the parameters of these processes are used to detect a video forgery. Patch analysis is performed by modeling video sequences as a mixture model of normal and anomalous patches, with the aim to separate these patches by identifying the distribution of each patch. We localize forged regions by visualizing the movement of removed objects using anomalous patches. We conduct our experiments at both pixel and video levels to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach to detection of video forgery. The experimental results show that our approach achieves excellent detection performance with low-computational complexity and leads to robust results for compressed and low-resolution videos.

A PatchMatch-based Dense-field Algorithm for Video Copy-Move Detection and Localization. We propose a new algorithm for the reliable detection and localization of video copy–move forgeries. Discovering well-crafted video copy–moves may be very difficult, especially when some uniform background is copied to occlude foreground objects. To reliably detect both additive and occlusive copy–moves, we use a dense-field approach, with invariant features that guarantee robustness to several postprocessing operations. To limit complexity, a suitable video-oriented version of PatchMatch is used, with a multiresolution search strategy, and a focus on volumes of interest. Performance assessment relies on a new dataset, designed <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ad hoc</italic> , with realistic copy–moves and a wide variety of challenging situations. Experimental results show the proposed method to detect and localize video copy–moves with good accuracy even in adverse conditions.

DeepFakes and Beyond: A Survey of Face Manipulation and Fake Detection •DeepFakes and beyond: types of facial manipulations.•Facial manipulation techniques.•Databases for research in face manipulation and fake detection.•Key benchmarks for technology evaluation of fake detection methods.•Summary of fake detection results for each facial manipulation group.

Distinctive Image Features from Scale-Invariant Keypoints This paper presents a method for extracting distinctive invariant features from images that can be used to perform reliable matching between different views of an object or scene. The features are invariant to image scale and rotation, and are shown to provide robust matching across a substantial range of affine distortion, change in 3D viewpoint, addition of noise, and change in illumination. The features are highly distinctive, in the sense that a single feature can be correctly matched with high probability against a large database of features from many images. This paper also describes an approach to using these features for object recognition. The recognition proceeds by matching individual features to a database of features from known objects using a fast nearest-neighbor algorithm, followed by a Hough transform to identify clusters belonging to a single object, and finally performing verification through least-squares solution for consistent pose parameters. This approach to recognition can robustly identify objects among clutter and occlusion while achieving near real-time performance.

ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge. The ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge is a benchmark in object category classification and detection on hundreds of object categories and millions of images. The challenge has been run annually from 2010 to present, attracting participation from more than fifty institutions. This paper describes the creation of this benchmark dataset and the advances in object recognition that have been possible as a result. We discuss the challenges of collecting large-scale ground truth annotation, highlight key breakthroughs in categorical object recognition, provide a detailed analysis of the current state of the field of large-scale image classification and object detection, and compare the state-of-the-art computer vision accuracy with human accuracy. We conclude with lessons learned in the 5 years of the challenge, and propose future directions and improvements.

A Comprehensive Survey on Internet of Things (IoT) Toward 5G Wireless Systems Recently, wireless technologies have been growing actively all around the world. In the context of wireless technology, fifth-generation (5G) technology has become a most challenging and interesting topic in wireless research. This article provides an overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) in 5G wireless systems. IoT in the 5G system will be a game changer in the future generation. It will open a door for new wireless architecture and smart services. Recent cellular network LTE (4G) will not be sufficient and efficient to meet the demands of multiple device connectivity and high data rate, more bandwidth, low-latency quality of service (QoS), and low interference. To address these challenges, we consider 5G as the most promising technology. We provide a detailed overview of challenges and vision of various communication industries in 5G IoT systems. The different layers in 5G IoT systems are discussed in detail. This article provides a comprehensive review on emerging and enabling technologies related to the 5G system that enables IoT. We consider the technology drivers for 5G wireless technology, such as 5G new radio (NR), multiple-input–multiple-output antenna with the beamformation technology, mm-wave commutation technology, heterogeneous networks (HetNets), the role of augmented reality (AR) in IoT, which are discussed in detail. We also provide a review on low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs), security challenges, and its control measure in the 5G IoT scenario. This article introduces the role of AR in the 5G IoT scenario. This article also discusses the research gaps and future directions. The focus is also on application areas of IoT in 5G systems. We, therefore, outline some of the important research directions in 5G IoT.

A communication robot in a shopping mall This paper reports our development of a communication robot for use in a shopping mall to provide shopping information, offer route guidance, and build rapport. In the development, the major difficulties included sensing human behaviors, conversation in a noisy daily environment, and the needs of unexpected miscellaneous knowledge in the conversation. We chose a networkrobot system approach, where a single robot's poor sensing capability and knowledge are supplemented by ubiquitous sensors and a human operator. The developed robot system detects a person with floor sensors to initiate interaction, identifies individuals with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, gives shopping information while chatting, and provides route guidance with deictic gestures. The robotwas partially teleoperated to avoid the difficulty of speech recognition as well as to furnish a new kind of knowledge that only humans can flexibly provide. The information supplied by a human operator was later used to increase the robot's autonomy. For 25 days in a shopping mall, we conducted a field trial and gathered 2642 interactions. A total of 235 participants signed up to use RFID tags and, later, provided questionnaire responses. The questionnaire results are promising in terms of the visitors' perceived acceptability as well as the encouragement of their shopping activities. The results of the teleoperation analysis revealed that the amount of teleoperation gradually decreased, which is also promising.

Minimum acceleration criterion with constraints implies bang-bang control as an underlying principle for optimal trajectories of arm reaching movements. Rapid arm-reaching movements serve as an excellent test bed for any theory about trajectory formation. How are these movements planned? A minimum acceleration criterion has been examined in the past, and the solution obtained, based on the Euler-Poisson equation, failed to predict that the hand would begin and end the movement at rest (i.e., with zero acceleration). Therefore, this criterion was rejected in favor of the minimum jerk, which was proved to be successful in describing many features of human movements. This letter follows an alternative approach and solves the minimum acceleration problem with constraints using Pontryagin's minimum principle. We use the minimum principle to obtain minimum acceleration trajectories and use the jerk as a control signal. In order to find a solution that does not include nonphysiological impulse functions, constraints on the maximum and minimum jerk values are assumed. The analytical solution provides a three-phase piecewise constant jerk signal (bang-bang control) where the magnitude of the jerk and the two switching times depend on the magnitude of the maximum and minimum available jerk values. This result fits the observed trajectories of reaching movements and takes into account both the extrinsic coordinates and the muscle limitations in a single framework. The minimum acceleration with constraints principle is discussed as a unifying approach for many observations about the neural control of movements.

An Automatic Screening Approach for Obstructive Sleep Apnea Diagnosis Based on Single-Lead Electrocardiogram Traditional approaches for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) diagnosis are apt to using multiple channels of physiological signals to detect apnea events by dividing the signals into equal-length segments, which may lead to incorrect apnea event detection and weaken the performance of OSA diagnosis. This paper proposes an automatic-segmentation-based screening approach with the single channel of Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal for OSA subject diagnosis, and the main work of the proposed approach lies in three aspects: (i) an automatic signal segmentation algorithm is adopted for signal segmentation instead of the equal-length segmentation rule; (ii) a local median filter is improved for reduction of the unexpected RR intervals before signal segmentation; (iii) the designed OSA severity index and additional admission information of OSA suspects are plugged into support vector machine (SVM) for OSA subject diagnosis. A real clinical example from PhysioNet database is provided to validate the proposed approach and an average accuracy of 97.41% for subject diagnosis is obtained which demonstrates the effectiveness for OSA diagnosis.

A blind medical image watermarking: DWT-SVD based robust and secure approach for telemedicine applications. In this paper, a blind image watermarking scheme based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed. In this scheme, DWT is applied on ROI (region of interest) of the medical image to get different frequency subbands of its wavelet decomposition. On the low frequency subband LL of the ROI, block-SVD is applied to get different singular matrices. A pair of elements with similar values is identified from the left singular value matrix of these selected blocks. The values of these pairs are modified using certain threshold to embed a bit of watermark content. Appropriate threshold is chosen to achieve the imperceptibility and robustness of medical image and watermark contents respectively. For authentication and identification of original medical image, one watermark image (logo) and other text watermark have been used. The watermark image provides authentication whereas the text data represents electronic patient record (EPR) for identification. At receiving end, blind recovery of both watermark contents is performed by a similar comparison scheme used during the embedding process. The proposed algorithm is applied on various groups of medical images like X-ray, CT scan and mammography. This scheme offers better visibility of watermarked image and recovery of watermark content due to DWT-SVD combination. Moreover, use of Hamming error correcting code (ECC) on EPR text bits reduces the BER and thus provides better recovery of EPR. The performance of proposed algorithm with EPR data coding by Hamming code is compared with the BCH error correcting code and it is found that later one perform better. A result analysis shows that imperceptibility of watermarked image is better as PSNR is above 43 dB and WPSNR is above 52 dB for all set of images. In addition, robustness of the scheme is better than existing scheme for similar set of medical images in terms of normalized correlation coefficient (NCC) and bit-error-rate (BER). An analysis is also carried out to verify the performance of the proposed scheme for different size of watermark contents (image and EPR data). It is observed from analysis that the proposed scheme is also appropriate for watermarking of color image. Using proposed scheme, watermark contents are extracted successfully under various noise attacks like JPEG compression, filtering, Gaussian noise, Salt and pepper noise, cropping, filtering and rotation. Performance comparison of proposed scheme with existing schemes shows proposed scheme has better robustness against different types of attacks. Moreover, the proposed scheme is also robust under set of benchmark attacks known as checkmark attacks.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Master-Slave Mutual Time Synchronization in a Wireless Body Area Network Time synchronization plays a crucial role in every distributed system and is particularly critical in Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), composed of several motes connected with different sensors. For health status monitoring applications using a star-topology to reduce the number of employed units, often the master node also integrates some sensors. In this paper we discuss in detail the issues associated with the inclusion of the master in the synchronization procedure, proposing a strategy that guarantees the complete master/slave synchronization. The proposed technique can be employed concurrently with every protocol which does not embed network time synchronization features.

The Sybil Attack Large-scale peer-to-peer systems facesecurity threats from faulty or hostile remotecomputing elements. To resist these threats, manysuch systems employ redundancy. However, if asingle faulty entity can present multiple identities,it can control a substantial fraction of the system,thereby undermining this redundancy. Oneapproach to preventing these &quot;Sybil attacks&quot; is tohave a trusted agency certify identities. Thispaper shows that, without a logically centralizedauthority, Sybil...

BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation Human evaluations of machine translation are extensive but expensive. Human evaluations can take months to finish and involve human labor that can not be reused. We propose a method of automatic machine translation evaluation that is quick, inexpensive, and language-independent, that correlates highly with human evaluation, and that has little marginal cost per run. We present this method as an automated understudy to skilled human judges which substitutes for them when there is need for quick or frequent evaluations.

Computational thinking Summary form only given. My vision for the 21st century, Computational Thinking, will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

Fuzzy logic in control systems: fuzzy logic controller. I.

Switching between stabilizing controllers This paper deals with the problem of switching between several linear time-invariant (LTI) controllers—all of them capable of stabilizing a speci4c LTI process—in such a way that the stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed for any switching sequence. We show that it is possible to 4nd realizations for any given family of controller transfer matrices so that the closed-loop system remains stable, no matter how we switch among the controller. The motivation for this problem is the control of complex systems where con8icting requirements make a single LTI controller unsuitable. ? 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

Tabu Search - Part I

Bidirectional recurrent neural networks In the first part of this paper, a regular recurrent neural network (RNN) is extended to a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN). The BRNN can be trained without the limitation of using input information just up to a preset future frame. This is accomplished by training it simultaneously in positive and negative time direction. Structure and training procedure of the proposed network are explained. In regression and classification experiments on artificial data, the proposed structure gives better results than other approaches. For real data, classification experiments for phonemes from the TIMIT database show the same tendency. In the second part of this paper, it is shown how the proposed bidirectional structure can be easily modified to allow efficient estimation of the conditional posterior probability of complete symbol sequences without making any explicit assumption about the shape of the distribution. For this part, experiments on real data are reported

An intensive survey of fair non-repudiation protocols With the phenomenal growth of the Internet and open networks in general, security services, such as non-repudiation, become crucial to many applications. Non-repudiation services must ensure that when Alice sends some information to Bob over a network, neither Alice nor Bob can deny having participated in a part or the whole of this communication. Therefore a fair non-repudiation protocol has to generate non-repudiation of origin evidences intended to Bob, and non-repudiation of receipt evidences destined to Alice. In this paper, we clearly define the properties a fair non-repudiation protocol must respect, and give a survey of the most important non-repudiation protocols without and with trusted third party (TTP). For the later ones we discuss the evolution of the TTP's involvement and, between others, describe the most recent protocol using a transparent TTP. We also discuss some ad-hoc problems related to the management of non-repudiation evidences.

Dynamic movement and positioning of embodied agents in multiparty conversations For embodied agents to engage in realistic multiparty conversation, they must stand in appropriate places with respect to other agents and the environment. When these factors change, such as an agent joining the conversation, the agents must dynamically move to a new location and/or orientation to accommodate. This paper presents an algorithm for simulating movement of agents based on observed human behavior using techniques developed for pedestrian movement in crowd simulations. We extend a previous group conversation simulation to include an agent motion algorithm. We examine several test cases and show how the simulation generates results that mirror real-life conversation settings.

An improved genetic algorithm with conditional genetic operators and its application to set-covering problem The genetic algorithm (GA) is a popular, biologically inspired optimization method. However, in the GA there is no rule of thumb to design the GA operators and select GA parameters. Instead, trial-and-error has to be applied. In this paper we present an improved genetic algorithm in which crossover and mutation are performed conditionally instead of probability. Because there are no crossover rate and mutation rate to be selected, the proposed improved GA can be more easily applied to a problem than the conventional genetic algorithms. The proposed improved genetic algorithm is applied to solve the set-covering problem. Experimental studies show that the improved GA produces better results over the conventional one and other methods.

Lane-level traffic estimations using microscopic traffic variables This paper proposes a novel inference method to estimate lane-level traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time on road segments where local information could not be measured and assessed directly. The main contributions of the proposed method are 1) the ability to perform lane-level estimations of traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time and 2) the ability to adapt to different traffic regimes by assessing only microscopic traffic variables. We propose a modified Kriging estimation model which explicitly takes into account both spatial and temporal variability. Performance evaluations are conducted using real-world data under different traffic regimes and it is shown that the proposed method outperforms a Kalman filter-based approach.

Convolutional Neural Network-Based Classification of Driver's Emotion during Aggressive and Smooth Driving Using Multi-Modal Camera Sensors. Because aggressive driving often causes large-scale loss of life and property, techniques for advance detection of adverse driver emotional states have become important for the prevention of aggressive driving behaviors. Previous studies have primarily focused on systems for detecting aggressive driver emotion via smart-phone accelerometers and gyro-sensors, or they focused on methods of detecting physiological signals using electroencephalography (EEG) or electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors. Because EEG and ECG sensors cause discomfort to drivers and can be detached from the driver's body, it becomes difficult to focus on bio-signals to determine their emotional state. Gyro-sensors and accelerometers depend on the performance of GPS receivers and cannot be used in areas where GPS signals are blocked. Moreover, if driving on a mountain road with many quick turns, a driver's emotional state can easily be misrecognized as that of an aggressive driver. To resolve these problems, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method of detecting emotion to identify aggressive driving using input images of the driver's face, obtained using near-infrared (NIR) light and thermal camera sensors. In this research, we conducted an experiment using our own database, which provides a high classification accuracy for detecting driver emotion leading to either aggressive or smooth (i.e., relaxed) driving. Our proposed method demonstrates better performance than existing methods.

Ethical Considerations Of Applying Robots In Kindergarten Settings: Towards An Approach From A Macroperspective In child-robot interaction (cHRI) research, many studies pursue the goal to develop interactive systems that can be applied in everyday settings. For early education, increasingly, the setting of a kindergarten is targeted. However, when cHRI and research are brought into a kindergarten, a range of ethical and related procedural aspects have to be considered and dealt with. While ethical models elaborated within other human-robot interaction settings, e.g., assisted living contexts, can provide some important indicators for relevant issues, we argue that it is important to start developing a systematic approach to identify and tackle those ethical issues which rise with cHRI in kindergarten settings on a more global level and address the impact of the technology from a macroperspective beyond the effects on the individual. Based on our experience in conducting studies with children in general and pedagogical considerations on the role of the institution of kindergarten in specific, in this paper, we enfold some relevant aspects that have barely been addressed in an explicit way in current cHRI research. Four areas are analyzed and key ethical issues are identified in each area: (1) the institutional setting of a kindergarten, (2) children as a vulnerable group, (3) the caregivers' role, and (4) pedagogical concepts. With our considerations, we aim at (i) broadening the methodology of the current studies within the area of cHRI, (ii) revalidate it based on our comprehensive empirical experience with research in kindergarten settings, both laboratory and real-world contexts, and (iii) provide a framework for the development of a more systematic approach to address the ethical issues in cHRI research within kindergarten settings.

Bias in Bios - A Case Study of Semantic Representation Bias in a High-Stakes Setting. We present a large-scale study of gender bias in occupation classification, a task where the use of machine learning may lead to negative outcomes on peoples' lives. We analyze the potential allocation harms that can result from semantic representation bias. To do so, we study the impact on occupation classification of including explicit gender indicators-such as first names and pronouns-in different semantic representations of online biographies. Additionally, we quantify the bias that remains when these indicators are "scrubbed," and describe proxy behavior that occurs in the absence of explicit gender indicators. As we demonstrate, differences in true positive rates between genders are correlated with existing gender imbalances in occupations, which may compound these imbalances.

BOLD: Dataset and Metrics for Measuring Biases in Open-Ended Language Generation Recent advances in deep learning techniques have enabled machines to generate cohesive open-ended text when prompted with a sequence of words as context. While these models now empower many downstream applications from conversation bots to automatic storytelling, they have been shown to generate texts that exhibit social biases. To systematically study and benchmark social biases in open-ended language generation, we introduce the Bias in Open-Ended Language Generation Dataset (BOLD), a large-scale dataset that consists of 23,679 English text generation prompts for bias benchmarking across five domains: profession, gender, race, religion, and political ideology. We also propose new automated metrics for toxicity, psycholinguistic norms, and text gender polarity to measure social biases in open-ended text generation from multiple angles. An examination of text generated from three popular language models reveals that the majority of these models exhibit a larger social bias than human-written Wikipedia text across all domains. With these results we highlight the need to benchmark biases in open-ended language generation and caution users of language generation models on downstream tasks to be cognizant of these embedded prejudices.

Detecting Emergent Intersectional Biases: Contextualized Word Embeddings Contain a Distribution of Human-like Biases With the starting point that implicit human biases are reflected in the statistical regularities of language, it is possible to measure biases in English static word embeddings. State-of-the-art neural language models generate dynamic word embeddings dependent on the context in which the word appears. Current methods measure pre-defined social and intersectional biases that occur in contexts defined by sentence templates. Dispensing with templates, we introduce the Contextualized Embedding Association Test (CEAT), that can summarize the magnitude of overall bias in neural language models by incorporating a random-effects model. Experiments on social and intersectional biases show that CEAT finds evidence of all tested biases and provides comprehensive information on the variance of effect magnitudes of the same bias in different contexts. All the models trained on English corpora that we study contain biased representations. GPT-2 contains the smallest magnitude of overall bias followed by GPT, BERT, and then ELMo, negatively correlating with the contextualization levels of the models. Furthermore, we develop two methods, Intersectional Bias Detection (IBD) and Emergent Intersectional Bias Detection (EIBD), to automatically identify the intersectional biases and emergent intersectional biases from static word embeddings in addition to measuring them in contextualized word embeddings. We present the first algorithmic bias detection findings on how intersectional group members are strongly associated with unique emergent biases that do not overlap with the biases of their constituent minority identities. IBD achieves an accuracy of 81.6% and 82.7%, respectively, when detecting the intersectional biases of African American females and Mexican American females, where the random correct identification rates are 14.3% and 13.3%. EIBD reaches an accuracy of 84.7% and 65.3%, respectively, when detecting the emergent intersectional biases unique to African American females and Mexican American females, where the random correct identification rates are 9.2% and 6.1%. Our results indicate that intersectional biases associated with members of multiple minority groups, such as African American females and Mexican American females, have the highest magnitude across all neural language models.

The Sybil Attack Large-scale peer-to-peer systems facesecurity threats from faulty or hostile remotecomputing elements. To resist these threats, manysuch systems employ redundancy. However, if asingle faulty entity can present multiple identities,it can control a substantial fraction of the system,thereby undermining this redundancy. Oneapproach to preventing these &quot;Sybil attacks&quot; is tohave a trusted agency certify identities. Thispaper shows that, without a logically centralizedauthority, Sybil...

Completely derandomized self-adaptation in evolution strategies. This paper puts forward two useful methods for self-adaptation of the mutation distribution - the concepts of derandomization and cumulation. Principle shortcomings of the concept of mutative strategy parameter control and two levels of derandomization are reviewed. Basic demands on the self-adaptation of arbitrary (normal) mutation distributions are developed. Applying arbitrary, normal mutation distributions is equivalent to applying a general, linear problem encoding. The underlying objective of mutative strategy parameter control is roughly to favor previously selected mutation steps in the future. If this objective is pursued rigorously, a completely derandomized self-adaptation scheme results, which adapts arbitrary normal mutation distributions. This scheme, called covariance matrix adaptation (CMA), meets the previously stated demands. It can still be considerably improved by cumulation - utilizing an evolution path rather than single search steps. Simulations on various test functions reveal local and global search properties of the evolution strategy with and without covariance matrix adaptation. Their performances are comparable only on perfectly scaled functions. On badly scaled, non-separable functions usually a speed up factor of several orders of magnitude is observed. On moderately mis-scaled functions a speed up factor of three to ten can be expected.

A survey on ear biometrics Recognizing people by their ear has recently received significant attention in the literature. Several reasons account for this trend: first, ear recognition does not suffer from some problems associated with other non-contact biometrics, such as face recognition; second, it is the most promising candidate for combination with the face in the context of multi-pose face recognition; and third, the ear can be used for human recognition in surveillance videos where the face may be occluded completely or in part. Further, the ear appears to degrade little with age. Even though current ear detection and recognition systems have reached a certain level of maturity, their success is limited to controlled indoor conditions. In addition to variation in illumination, other open research problems include hair occlusion, earprint forensics, ear symmetry, ear classification, and ear individuality. This article provides a detailed survey of research conducted in ear detection and recognition. It provides an up-to-date review of the existing literature revealing the current state-of-art for not only those who are working in this area but also for those who might exploit this new approach. Furthermore, it offers insights into some unsolved ear recognition problems as well as ear databases available for researchers.

Crowd sensing of traffic anomalies based on human mobility and social media The advances in mobile computing and social networking services enable people to probe the dynamics of a city. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting and describing traffic anomalies using crowd sensing with two forms of data, human mobility and social media. Traffic anomalies are caused by accidents, control, protests, sport events, celebrations, disasters and other events. Unlike existing traffic-anomaly-detection methods, we identify anomalies according to drivers' routing behavior on an urban road network. Here, a detected anomaly is represented by a sub-graph of a road network where drivers' routing behaviors significantly differ from their original patterns. We then try to describe the detected anomaly by mining representative terms from the social media that people posted when the anomaly happened. The system for detecting such traffic anomalies can benefit both drivers and transportation authorities, e.g., by notifying drivers approaching an anomaly and suggesting alternative routes, as well as supporting traffic jam diagnosis and dispersal. We evaluate our system with a GPS trajectory dataset generated by over 30,000 taxicabs over a period of 3 months in Beijing, and a dataset of tweets collected from WeiBo, a Twitter-like social site in China. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our system.

Distributed Optimization and Statistical Learning via the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers Many problems of recent interest in statistics and machine learning can be posed in the framework of convex optimization. Due to the explosion in size and complexity of modern datasets, it is increasingly important to be able to solve problems with a very large number of features or training examples. As a result, both the decentralized collection or storage of these datasets as well as accompanying distributed solution methods are either necessary or at least highly desirable. In this review, we argue that the alternating direction method of multipliers is well suited to distributed convex optimization, and in particular to large-scale problems arising in statistics, machine learning, and related areas. The method was developed in the 1970s, with roots in the 1950s, and is equivalent or closely related to many other algorithms, such as dual decomposition, the method of multipliers, Douglas–Rachford splitting, Spingarn's method of partial inverses, Dykstra's alternating projections, Bregman iterative algorithms for ℓ1 problems, proximal methods, and others. After briefly surveying the theory and history of the algorithm, we discuss applications to a wide variety of statistical and machine learning problems of recent interest, including the lasso, sparse logistic regression, basis pursuit, covariance selection, support vector machines, and many others. We also discuss general distributed optimization, extensions to the nonconvex setting, and efficient implementation, including some details on distributed MPI and Hadoop MapReduce implementations.

A lattice model of secure information flow This paper investigates mechanisms that guarantee secure information flow in a computer system. These mechanisms are examined within a mathematical framework suitable for formulating the requirements of secure information flow among security classes. The central component of the model is a lattice structure derived from the security classes and justified by the semantics of information flow. The lattice properties permit concise formulations of the security requirements of different existing systems and facilitate the construction of mechanisms that enforce security. The model provides a unifying view of all systems that restrict information flow, enables a classification of them according to security objectives, and suggests some new approaches. It also leads to the construction of automatic program certification mechanisms for verifying the secure flow of information through a program.

Hitting the right paraphrases in good time We present a random-walk-based approach to learning paraphrases from bilingual parallel corpora. The corpora are represented as a graph in which a node corresponds to a phrase, and an edge exists between two nodes if their corresponding phrases are aligned in a phrase table. We sample random walks to compute the average number of steps it takes to reach a ranking of paraphrases with better ones being "closer" to a phrase of interest. This approach allows "feature" nodes that represent domain knowledge to be built into the graph, and incorporates truncation techniques to prevent the graph from growing too large for efficiency. Current approaches, by contrast, implicitly presuppose the graph to be bipartite, are limited to finding paraphrases that are of length two away from a phrase, and do not generally permit easy incorporation of domain knowledge. Manual evaluation of generated output shows that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art system of Callison-Burch (2008).

High delivery rate position-based routing algorithms for 3D ad hoc networks Position-based routing algorithms use the geographic position of the nodes in a network to make the forwarding decisions. Recent research in this field primarily addresses such routing algorithms in two dimensional (2D) space. However, in real applications, nodes may be distributed in three dimensional (3D) environments. In this paper, we propose several randomized position-based routing algorithms and their combination with restricted directional flooding-based algorithms for routing in 3D environments. The first group of algorithms AB3D are extensions of previous randomized routing algorithms from 2D space to 3D space. The second group ABLAR chooses m neighbors according to a space-partition heuristic and forwards the message to all these nodes. The third group T-ABLAR-T uses progress-based routing until a local minimum is reached. The algorithm then switches to ABLAR for one step after which the algorithm switches back to the progress-based algorithm again. The fourth group AB3D-ABLAR uses an algorithm from the AB3D group until a threshold is passed in terms of number of hops. The algorithm then switches to an ABLAR algorithm. The algorithms are evaluated and compared with current routing algorithms. The simulation results on unit disk graphs (UDG) show a significant improvement in delivery rate (up to 99%) and a large reduction of the traffic.

Achievable Rates of Full-Duplex MIMO Radios in Fast Fading Channels With Imperfect Channel Estimation We study the theoretical performance of two full-duplex multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radio systems: a full-duplex bi-directional communication system and a full-duplex relay system. We focus on the effect of a (digitally manageable) residual self-interference due to imperfect channel estimation (with independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Gaussian channel estimation error) and transmitter noise. We assume that the instantaneous channel state information (CSI) is not available the transmitters. To maximize the system ergodic mutual information, which is a nonconvex function of power allocation vectors at the nodes, a gradient projection algorithm is developed to optimize the power allocation vectors. This algorithm exploits both spatial and temporal freedoms of the source covariance matrices of the MIMO links between transmitters and receivers to achieve higher sum ergodic mutual information. It is observed through simulations that the full-duplex mode is optimal when the nominal self-interference is low, and the half-duplex mode is optimal when the nominal self-interference is high. In addition to an exact closed-form ergodic mutual information expression, we introduce a much simpler asymptotic closed-form ergodic mutual information expression, which in turn simplifies the computation of the power allocation vectors.

Surrogate-assisted hierarchical particle swarm optimization. Meta-heuristic algorithms, which require a large number of fitness evaluations before locating the global optimum, are often prevented from being applied to computationally expensive real-world problems where one fitness evaluation may take from minutes to hours, or even days. Although many surrogate-assisted meta-heuristic optimization algorithms have been proposed, most of them were developed for solving expensive problems up to 30 dimensions. In this paper, we propose a surrogate-assisted hierarchical particle swarm optimizer for high-dimensional problems consisting of a standard particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and a social learning particle swarm optimization algorithm (SL-PSO), where the PSO and SL-PSO work together to explore and exploit the search space, and simultaneously enhance the global and local performance of the surrogate model. Our experimental results on seven benchmark functions of dimensions 30, 50 and 100 demonstrate that the proposed method is competitive compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms under a limited computational budget.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Secure Deduplication Based on Rabin Fingerprinting over Wireless Sensing Data in Cloud Computing. The rapid advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing technologies have significantly promoted the collection and sharing of various data. In order to reduce the communication cost and the storage overhead, it is necessary to exploit data deduplication mechanisms. However, existing data deduplication technologies still suffer security and efficiency drawbacks. In this paper, we propose two secure data deduplication schemes based on Rabin fingerprinting over wireless sensing data in cloud computing. The first scheme is based on deterministic tags and the other one adopts random tags. The proposed schemes realize data deduplication before the data is outsourced to the cloud storage server, and hence both the communication cost and the computation cost are reduced. In particular, variable-size block-level deduplication is enabled based on the technique of Rabin fingerprinting which generates data blocks based on the content of the data. Before outsourcing data to the cloud, users encrypt the data based on convergent encryption technologies, which protects the data from being accessed by unauthorized users. Our security analysis shows that the proposed schemes are secure against offline brute-force dictionary attacks. In addition, the random tag makes the second scheme more reliable. Extensive experimental results indicate that the proposed data deduplication schemes are efficient in terms of the deduplication rate, the system operation time, and the tag generation time.

The Sybil Attack Large-scale peer-to-peer systems facesecurity threats from faulty or hostile remotecomputing elements. To resist these threats, manysuch systems employ redundancy. However, if asingle faulty entity can present multiple identities,it can control a substantial fraction of the system,thereby undermining this redundancy. Oneapproach to preventing these &quot;Sybil attacks&quot; is tohave a trusted agency certify identities. Thispaper shows that, without a logically centralizedauthority, Sybil...

BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation Human evaluations of machine translation are extensive but expensive. Human evaluations can take months to finish and involve human labor that can not be reused. We propose a method of automatic machine translation evaluation that is quick, inexpensive, and language-independent, that correlates highly with human evaluation, and that has little marginal cost per run. We present this method as an automated understudy to skilled human judges which substitutes for them when there is need for quick or frequent evaluations.

Computational thinking Summary form only given. My vision for the 21st century, Computational Thinking, will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

Fuzzy logic in control systems: fuzzy logic controller. I.

Switching between stabilizing controllers This paper deals with the problem of switching between several linear time-invariant (LTI) controllers—all of them capable of stabilizing a speci4c LTI process—in such a way that the stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed for any switching sequence. We show that it is possible to 4nd realizations for any given family of controller transfer matrices so that the closed-loop system remains stable, no matter how we switch among the controller. The motivation for this problem is the control of complex systems where con8icting requirements make a single LTI controller unsuitable. ? 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

Tabu Search - Part I

Bidirectional recurrent neural networks In the first part of this paper, a regular recurrent neural network (RNN) is extended to a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN). The BRNN can be trained without the limitation of using input information just up to a preset future frame. This is accomplished by training it simultaneously in positive and negative time direction. Structure and training procedure of the proposed network are explained. In regression and classification experiments on artificial data, the proposed structure gives better results than other approaches. For real data, classification experiments for phonemes from the TIMIT database show the same tendency. In the second part of this paper, it is shown how the proposed bidirectional structure can be easily modified to allow efficient estimation of the conditional posterior probability of complete symbol sequences without making any explicit assumption about the shape of the distribution. For this part, experiments on real data are reported

An intensive survey of fair non-repudiation protocols With the phenomenal growth of the Internet and open networks in general, security services, such as non-repudiation, become crucial to many applications. Non-repudiation services must ensure that when Alice sends some information to Bob over a network, neither Alice nor Bob can deny having participated in a part or the whole of this communication. Therefore a fair non-repudiation protocol has to generate non-repudiation of origin evidences intended to Bob, and non-repudiation of receipt evidences destined to Alice. In this paper, we clearly define the properties a fair non-repudiation protocol must respect, and give a survey of the most important non-repudiation protocols without and with trusted third party (TTP). For the later ones we discuss the evolution of the TTP's involvement and, between others, describe the most recent protocol using a transparent TTP. We also discuss some ad-hoc problems related to the management of non-repudiation evidences.

Dynamic movement and positioning of embodied agents in multiparty conversations For embodied agents to engage in realistic multiparty conversation, they must stand in appropriate places with respect to other agents and the environment. When these factors change, such as an agent joining the conversation, the agents must dynamically move to a new location and/or orientation to accommodate. This paper presents an algorithm for simulating movement of agents based on observed human behavior using techniques developed for pedestrian movement in crowd simulations. We extend a previous group conversation simulation to include an agent motion algorithm. We examine several test cases and show how the simulation generates results that mirror real-life conversation settings.

An improved genetic algorithm with conditional genetic operators and its application to set-covering problem The genetic algorithm (GA) is a popular, biologically inspired optimization method. However, in the GA there is no rule of thumb to design the GA operators and select GA parameters. Instead, trial-and-error has to be applied. In this paper we present an improved genetic algorithm in which crossover and mutation are performed conditionally instead of probability. Because there are no crossover rate and mutation rate to be selected, the proposed improved GA can be more easily applied to a problem than the conventional genetic algorithms. The proposed improved genetic algorithm is applied to solve the set-covering problem. Experimental studies show that the improved GA produces better results over the conventional one and other methods.

Lane-level traffic estimations using microscopic traffic variables This paper proposes a novel inference method to estimate lane-level traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time on road segments where local information could not be measured and assessed directly. The main contributions of the proposed method are 1) the ability to perform lane-level estimations of traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time and 2) the ability to adapt to different traffic regimes by assessing only microscopic traffic variables. We propose a modified Kriging estimation model which explicitly takes into account both spatial and temporal variability. Performance evaluations are conducted using real-world data under different traffic regimes and it is shown that the proposed method outperforms a Kalman filter-based approach.

Convolutional Neural Network-Based Classification of Driver's Emotion during Aggressive and Smooth Driving Using Multi-Modal Camera Sensors. Because aggressive driving often causes large-scale loss of life and property, techniques for advance detection of adverse driver emotional states have become important for the prevention of aggressive driving behaviors. Previous studies have primarily focused on systems for detecting aggressive driver emotion via smart-phone accelerometers and gyro-sensors, or they focused on methods of detecting physiological signals using electroencephalography (EEG) or electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors. Because EEG and ECG sensors cause discomfort to drivers and can be detached from the driver's body, it becomes difficult to focus on bio-signals to determine their emotional state. Gyro-sensors and accelerometers depend on the performance of GPS receivers and cannot be used in areas where GPS signals are blocked. Moreover, if driving on a mountain road with many quick turns, a driver's emotional state can easily be misrecognized as that of an aggressive driver. To resolve these problems, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method of detecting emotion to identify aggressive driving using input images of the driver's face, obtained using near-infrared (NIR) light and thermal camera sensors. In this research, we conducted an experiment using our own database, which provides a high classification accuracy for detecting driver emotion leading to either aggressive or smooth (i.e., relaxed) driving. Our proposed method demonstrates better performance than existing methods.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Preliminary assessment of the efficacy of supplementing knee extension capability in a lower limb exoskeleton with FES. The authors describe a cooperative controller that combines the knee joint actuation of an externally powered lower limb exoskeleton with the torque and power contribution from the electrically stimulated quadriceps muscle group. The efficacy of combining these efforts is experimentally validated with a series of weighted leg lift maneuvers. Measurements from these experiments indicate that the control approach effectively combines the respective efforts of the motor and muscle, such that good control performance is achieved, with substantial torque and energy contributions from both the biological and non-biological actuators.

Design and simulation of a joint-coupled orthosis for regulating FES-aided gait A hybrid functional electrical stimulation (FES)/orthosis system is being developed which combines two channels of (surface-electrode-based) electrical stimulation with a computer-controlled orthosis for the purpose of restoring gait to spinal cord injured (SCI) individuals (albeit with a stability aid, such as a walker). The orthosis is an energetically passive, controllable device which 1) unidirectionally couples hip to knee flexion; 2) aids hip and knee flexion with a spring assist; and 3) incorporates sensors and modulated friction brakes, which are used in conjunction with electrical stimulation for the feedback control of joint (and therefore limb) trajectories. This paper describes the hybrid FES approach and the design of the joint coupled orthosis. A dynamic simulation of an SCI individual using the hybrid approach is described, and results from the simulation are presented that indicate the promise of the JCO approach.

Finite State Control of FES-Assisted Walking with Spring Brake Orthosis This paper presents finite state control (FSC) of paraplegic walking with wheel walker using functional electrical stimulation (FES) with spring brake orthosis (SBO). The work is a first effort towards restoring natural like swing phase in paraplegic gait through a new hybrid orthosis, referred to as spring brake orthosis (SBO). This mechanism simplifies the control task and results in smooth motion and more-natural like trajectory produced by the flexion reflex for gait in spinal cord injured subjects. The study is carried out with a model of humanoid with wheel walker using the Visual Nastran (Vn4D) dynamic simulation software. Stimulated muscle model of quadriceps is developed for knee extension. Fuzzy logic control (FLC) is developed in Matlab/Simulink to regulate the muscle stimulation pulse-width required to drive FES-assisted walking gait and the computed motion is visualised in graphic animation from Vn4D and finite state control is used to control the transaction between all walking states. Finite state control (FSC) is used to control the switching of brakes, FES and spring during walking cycle.

Assist-As-Needed Training Paradigms For Robotic Rehabilitation Of Spinal Cord Injuries This paper introduces a new "assist-as-needed" (AAN) training paradigm for rehabilitation of spinal cord injuries via robotic training devices. In the pilot study reported in this paper, nine female adult Swiss-Webster mice were divided into three groups, each experiencing a different robotic training control strategy: a fixed training trajectory (Fixed Group, A), an AAN training method without interlimb coordination (Band Group, B), and an AAN training method with bilateral hindlimb coordination (Window Group, C). Fourteen days after complete transection at the mid-thoracic level, the mice were robotically trained to step in the presence of an acutely administered serotonin agonist, quipazine, for a period of six weeks. The mice that received AAN training (Groups B and C) show higher levels of recovery than Group A mice, as measured by the number, consistency, and periodicity of steps realized during testing sessions. Group C displays a higher incidence of alternating stepping than Group B. These results indicate that this training approach may be more effective than fixed trajectory paradigms in promoting robust post-injury stepping behavior. Furthermore, the constraint of interlimb coordination appears to be an important contribution to successful training.

Hybrid therapy of walking with Kinesis overground robot for persons with incomplete spinal cord injury: A feasibility study Rehabilitation of walking ability is one of the most important objectives after a spinal cord injury. Robotic and neuroprosthetic technologies hold a considerable potential for driving walking rehabilitation therapies. However, new developments are needed in order to improve the walking rehabilitation interventions based in these technologies.

AssistOn-Knee: A self-aligning knee exoskeleton We present kinematics, actuation, detailed design, characterization results and initial user evaluations of AssistOn-Knee, a novel self-aligning active exoskeleton for robot-assisted knee rehabilitation. AssistOn-Knee can, not only assist flexion/extension movements of the knee joint but also accommodate its translational movements in the sagittal plane. Automatically aligning its joint axes, AssistOn-Knee enables an ideal match between human knee axis and the exoskeleton axis, guaranteeing ergonomy and comfort throughout the therapy. Self-aligning feature significantly shortens the setup time required to attach the patient to the exoskeleton, allowing more effective time spent on exercises. The proposed exoskeleton actively controls the rotational degree of freedom of the knee through a Bowden cable-driven series elastic actuator, while the translational movements of the knee joints are passively accommodated through use of a 3 degrees of freedom planar parallel mechanism. AssistOn-Knee possesses a lightweight and compact design with significantly low apparent inertia, thanks to its Bowden cable based transmission that allows remote location of the actuator and reduction unit. Furthermore, thanks to its series-elastic actuation, AssistOn-Knee enables high-fidelity force control and active backdrive-ability within its control bandwidth, while featuring passive elasticity for excitations above this bandwidth, ensuring safety and robustness throughout the whole frequency spectrum.

Lower Extremity Exoskeletons and Active Orthoses: Challenges and State-of-the-Art In the nearly six decades since researchers began to explore methods of creating them, exoskeletons have progressed from the stuff of science fiction to nearly commercialized products. While there are still many challenges associated with exoskeleton development that have yet to be perfected, the advances in the field have been enormous. In this paper, we review the history and discuss the state-of-the-art of lower limb exoskeletons and active orthoses. We provide a design overview of hardware, actuation, sensory, and control systems for most of the devices that have been described in the literature, and end with a discussion of the major advances that have been made and hurdles yet to be overcome.

Development of A Meal Assistive Exoskeleton made of Soft Materials for polymyositis patients Main goal of this research is to design and fabricate an exoskeleton type assistive device for polymyositis patients, which is extremely compact, lightweight and also comfortable. In order to achieve this goal, the target motion of the device is focused on eating motion which is one of the most important task of daily life. Also, the exoskeleton is designed with soft materials such as fabric, rubber, wire and other compliant materials. The most rigid component used in the exoskeleton is a supporting part made of flexible board. By adopting these materials and concentrating on specific target motion, the number and size of the actuators can be reduced so that total complexity, weight and size of the device decrease. Also, the characteristics of soft material allows comfortable wearing sensation, low cost and good appearance. Therefore, the device becomes affordable and convenient. Polymyositis patients are chosen as the target user since the characteristics of their symptom can reduce complexity of the exoskeleton. Also a special controller is designed to utilize the available motion of the polymyositis patients. Some experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the exoskeleton.

Distributed Representations, Simple Recurrent Networks, And Grammatical Structure In this paper three problems for a connectionist account of language are considered:1. What is the nature of linguistic representations?2. How can complex structural relationships such as constituent structure be represented?3. How can the apparently open-ended nature of language be accommodated by a fixed-resource system?Using a prediction task, a simple recurrent network (SRN) is trained on multiclausal sentences which contain multiply-embedded relative clauses. Principal component analysis of the hidden unit activation patterns reveals that the network solves the task by developing complex distributed representations which encode the relevant grammatical relations and hierarchical constituent structure. Differences between the SRN state representations and the more traditional pushdown store are discussed in the final section.

An optimal parallel algorithm for the minimum circle-cover problem Given a set of n circular arcs, the problem of finding a minimum number of circular arcs whose union covers the whole circle has been considered both in sequential and parallel computational models. Here we present a parallel algorithm in the EREW PRAM model that runs in O(log n) time using O(n) processors if the arcs are not given already sorted, and using O(n/log n) processors otherwise. Our algorithm is optimal since the problem has an Ω(n log n) lower bound for the unsorted-arcs case, and an Ω(n) lower bound for the sorted-arcs case. The previous best known parallel algorithm runs in O(log n) time using O(n2) processors, in the worst case, in the CREW PRAM model.

On (k, n)*-visual cryptography scheme Let P = {1, 2, . . . , n} be a set of elements called participants. In this paper we construct a visual cryptography scheme (VCS) for the strong access structure specified by the set Γ0 of all minimal qualified sets, where $${\Gamma_0=\{S: S\subseteq P, 1\in S}$$ and |S| = k}. Any VCS for this strong access structure is called a (k, n)*-VCS. We also obtain bounds for the optimal pixel expansion and optimal relative contrast for a (k, n)*-VCS.

Survey of Important Issues in UAV Communication Networks Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have enormous potential in the public and civil domains. These are particularly useful in applications, where human lives would otherwise be endangered. Multi-UAV systems can collaboratively complete missions more efficiently and economically as compared to single UAV systems. However, there are many issues to be resolved before effective use of UAVs can be made to provide stable and reliable context-specific networks. Much of the work carried out in the areas of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), and vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) does not address the unique characteristics of the UAV networks. UAV networks may vary from slow dynamic to dynamic and have intermittent links and fluid topology. While it is believed that ad hoc mesh network would be most suitable for UAV networks yet the architecture of multi-UAV networks has been an understudied area. Software defined networking (SDN) could facilitate flexible deployment and management of new services and help reduce cost, increase security and availability in networks. Routing demands of UAV networks go beyond the needs of MANETS and VANETS. Protocols are required that would adapt to high mobility, dynamic topology, intermittent links, power constraints, and changing link quality. UAVs may fail and the network may get partitioned making delay and disruption tolerance an important design consideration. Limited life of the node and dynamicity of the network lead to the requirement of seamless handovers, where researchers are looking at the work done in the areas of MANETs and VANETs, but the jury is still out. As energy supply on UAVs is limited, protocols in various layers should contribute toward greening of the network. This paper surveys the work done toward all of these outstanding issues, relating to this new class of networks, so as to spur further research in these areas.

Adaptive fuzzy tracking control for switched uncertain strict-feedback nonlinear systems. •Adaptive tracking control for switched strict-feedback nonlinear systems is proposed.•The generalized fuzzy hyperbolic model is used to approximate nonlinear functions.•The designed controller has fewer design parameters comparing with existing methods.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Robust and discriminative zero-watermark scheme based on invariant features and similarity-based retrieval to protect large-scale DIBR 3D videos •Fuse zero watermark and retrieval techniques to protect large-scale DIBR videos.•Design robust and discriminative features for precise and reliable protection.•Design attention-based fusion method to provide flexible copyright protection.

A novel hashing scheme for Depth-image-based-rendering 3D images. Image hashing as an advanced approach has been widely applied in many areas such as image authentication, and content-based identification and retrieval. Being different from the traditional 2D image hashing scheme, virtual images which are generated in the DIBR process should be considered with the same content as the center image in Depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) 3D image hashing scheme. In this paper, we propose a hashing method for DIBR 3D images by applying three-level Dual-tree complex wavelet transform (DT-CWT) to images and selecting suitable DT-CWT coefficients to form the final hash sequence. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method is robust to a wide range of distortions and attacks. When compared with the current state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method can achieve better identification performances in terms of geometric attacks such as rotation attacks, whilst providing comparable performances under classical distortions such as additive noise, blurring, and compression. Furthermore, the proposed method is also able to ensure that the generated virtual images could be identified with the same content as the corresponding center image due to the characteristic approximate shift invariance of DT-CWT.

An attention-based decision fusion scheme for multimedia information retrieval In this paper, we proposed a novel decision fusion scheme based on the psychological observations on human beings' visual and aural attention characteristics, which combines a set of decisions obtained from different data sources or features to generate better decision result. Based on studying of the “heterogeneity” and “monotonicity” properties of certain types of decision fusion issues, a set of so-called Attention Fusion Functions are devised, which are able to obtain more reasonable fusion results than typical fusion schemes. Preliminary experiment on image retrieval shows the effectiveness of the proposed fusion scheme.

Fast computation of Jacobi-Fourier moments for invariant image recognition The Jacobi-Fourier moments (JFMs) provide a wide class of orthogonal rotation invariant moments (ORIMs) which are useful for many image processing, pattern recognition and computer vision applications. They, however, suffer from high time complexity and numerical instability at high orders of moment. In this paper, a fast method based on the recursive computation of radial kernel function of JFMs is proposed which not only reduces time complexity but also improves their numerical stability. Fast recursive method for the computation of Jacobi-Fourier moments is proposed.The proposed method not only reduces time complexity but also improves numerical stability of moments.Better image reconstruction is achieved with lower reconstruction error.Proposed method is useful for many image processing, pattern recognition and computer vision applications.

Image representation by harmonic transforms with parameters in SL(2, R). •New kinds of invariant harmonic transforms with parameters in SL(2,R) are proposed.•The capabilities of the proposed PLCT and the 2-D LCTS on image representation are analyzed.

A kernel-based method for fast and accurate computation of PHT in polar coordinates A novel kernel-based method is proposed for fast, highly accurate and numerically stable computations of polar harmonic transforms (PHT) in polar coordinates. Euler formula is used to derive a novel trigonometric formula where the later one is used in the kernel generation. The simplified radial and angular kernels are used in efficient computation PHTs. The proposed method removes the numerical approximation errors involved in conventional methods and provides highly accurate PHTs coefficients which results in highly improved image reconstruction capabilities. Numerical experiments are performed where the results are compared with those of the recent existing methods. In addition to the tremendous reduction in computational times, the obtained results of the proposed method clearly show a significant improvement in rotational invariance.

A Hybrid Transforms-Based Robust Video Zero-Watermarking Algorithm for Resisting High Efficiency Video Coding Compression With the rampancy of pirated videos, video watermarking for copyright protection has become a widely researched topic. In this paper, zero-watermarking is applied to videos for the first time to resist high efficiency video coding compression, which can improve the robustness of the watermarking algorithm and ensure the videos' quality. A robust video zero-watermarking algorithm based on the discrete wavelet transform, the all phase biorthogonal transform, and singular value decomposition is proposed. Utilizing the properties of hybrid transforms, robust features can be extracted from videos, and robust zero-watermarks can be constructed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm has strong robustness to high efficiency video coding compression attacks with different quantization parameters. In addition, the algorithm can also resist common image processing attacks, geometric attacks, frame-based attacks, and hybrid attacks. Compared with existing video watermarking algorithms, the proposed algorithm can more accurately and completely reconstruct watermark images.

A Low-Complexity Analytical Modeling for Cross-Layer Adaptive Error Protection in Video Over WLAN We find a low-complicity and accurate model to solve the problem of optimizing MAC-layer transmission of real-time video over wireless local area networks (WLANs) using cross-layer techniques. The objective in this problem is to obtain the optimal MAC retry limit in order to minimize the total packet loss rate. First, the accuracy of Fluid and M/M/1/K analytical models is examined. Then we derive a closed-form expression for service time in WLAN MAC transmission, and will use this in mathematical formulation of our optimization problem based on M/G/1 model. Subsequently we introduce an approximate and simple formula for MAC-layer service time, which leads to the M/M/1 model. Compared with M/G/1, we particularly show that our M/M/1-based model provides a low-complexity and yet quite accurate means for analyzing MAC transmission process in WLAN. Using our M/M/1 model-based analysis, we derive closed-form formulas for the packet overflow drop rate and optimum retry-limit. These closed-form expressions can be effectively invoked for analyzing adaptive retry-limit algorithms. Simulation results (network simulator-2) will verify the accuracy of our analytical models.

Multi-Armed Bandit-Based Client Scheduling for Federated Learning By exploiting the computing power and local data of distributed clients, federated learning (FL) features ubiquitous properties such as reduction of communication overhead and preserving data privacy. In each communication round of FL, the clients update local models based on their own data and upload their local updates via wireless channels. However, latency caused by hundreds to thousands of communication rounds remains a bottleneck in FL. To minimize the training latency, this work provides a multi-armed bandit-based framework for online client scheduling (CS) in FL without knowing wireless channel state information and statistical characteristics of clients. Firstly, we propose a CS algorithm based on the upper confidence bound policy (CS-UCB) for ideal scenarios where local datasets of clients are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and balanced. An upper bound of the expected performance regret of the proposed CS-UCB algorithm is provided, which indicates that the regret grows logarithmically over communication rounds. Then, to address non-ideal scenarios with non-i.i.d. and unbalanced properties of local datasets and varying availability of clients, we further propose a CS algorithm based on the UCB policy and virtual queue technique (CS-UCB-Q). An upper bound is also derived, which shows that the expected performance regret of the proposed CS-UCB-Q algorithm can have a sub-linear growth over communication rounds under certain conditions. Besides, the convergence performance of FL training is also analyzed. Finally, simulation results validate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.

A new optimization method: big bang-big crunch Nature is the principal source for proposing new optimization methods such as genetic algorithms (GA) and simulated annealing (SA) methods. All traditional evolutionary algorithms are heuristic population-based search procedures that incorporate random variation and selection. The main contribution of this study is that it proposes a novel optimization method that relies on one of the theories of the evolution of the universe; namely, the Big Bang and Big Crunch Theory. In the Big Bang phase, energy dissipation produces disorder and randomness is the main feature of this phase; whereas, in the Big Crunch phase, randomly distributed particles are drawn into an order. Inspired by this theory, an optimization algorithm is constructed, which will be called the Big Bang-Big Crunch (BB-BC) method that generates random points in the Big Bang phase and shrinks those points to a single representative point via a center of mass or minimal cost approach in the Big Crunch phase. It is shown that the performance of the new (BB-BC) method demonstrates superiority over an improved and enhanced genetic search algorithm also developed by the authors of this study, and outperforms the classical genetic algorithm (GA) for many benchmark test functions.

Using noise inconsistencies for blind image forensics A commonly used tool to conceal the traces of tampering is the addition of locally random noise to the altered image regions. The noise degradation is the main cause of failure of many active or passive image forgery detection methods. Typically, the amount of noise is uniform across the entire authentic image. Adding locally random noise may cause inconsistencies in the image's noise. Therefore, the detection of various noise levels in an image may signify tampering. In this paper, we propose a novel method capable of dividing an investigated image into various partitions with homogenous noise levels. In other words, we introduce a segmentation method detecting changes in noise level. We assume the additive white Gaussian noise. Several examples are shown to demonstrate the proposed method's output. An extensive quantitative measure of the efficiency of the noise estimation part as a function of different noise standard deviations, region sizes and various JPEG compression qualities is proposed as well.

Cost-Effective Authentic and Anonymous Data Sharing with Forward Security Data sharing has never been easier with the advances of cloud computing, and an accurate analysis on the shared data provides an array of benefits to both the society and individuals. Data sharing with a large number of participants must take into account several issues, including efficiency, data integrity and privacy of data owner. Ring signature is a promising candidate to construct an anonymous and authentic data sharing system. It allows a data owner to anonymously authenticate his data which can be put into the cloud for storage or analysis purpose. Yet the costly certificate verification in the traditional public key infrastructure (PKI) setting becomes a bottleneck for this solution to be scalable. Identity-based (ID-based) ring signature, which eliminates the process of certificate verification, can be used instead. In this paper, we further enhance the security of ID-based ring signature by providing forward security: If a secret key of any user has been compromised, all previous generated signatures that include this user still remain valid. This property is especially important to any large scale data sharing system, as it is impossible to ask all data owners to reauthenticate their data even if a secret key of one single user has been compromised. We provide a concrete and efficient instantiation of our scheme, prove its security and provide an implementation to show its practicality.

A robust medical image watermarking against salt and pepper noise for brain MRI images. The ever-growing numbers of medical digital images and the need to share them among specialists and hospitals for better and more accurate diagnosis require that patients' privacy be protected. During the transmission of medical images between hospitals or specialists through the network, the main priority is to protect a patient's documents against any act of tampering by unauthorised individuals. Because of this, there is a need for medical image authentication scheme to enable proper diagnosis on patient. In addition, medical images are also susceptible to salt and pepper impulse noise through the transmission in communication channels. This noise may also be intentionally used by the invaders to corrupt the embedded watermarks inside the medical images. A common drawback of existing watermarking methods is their weakness against salt and pepper noise. The research carried out in this work addresses the issue of designing a new watermarking method that can withstand high density of salt and pepper noise for brain MRI images. For this purpose, combination of a spatial domain watermarking method, channel coding and noise filtering schemes are used. The region of non-interest (RONI) of MRI images from five different databases are used as embedding area and electronic patient record (EPR) is considered as embedded data. The quality of watermarked image is evaluated using Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM), and the accuracy of the extracted watermark is assessed in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER).

A Hierarchical Architecture Using Biased Min-Consensus for USV Path Planning This paper proposes a hierarchical architecture using the biased min-consensus (BMC) method, to solve the path planning problem of unmanned surface vessel (USV). We take the fixed-point monitoring mission as an example, where a series of intermediate monitoring points should be visited once by USV. The whole framework incorporates the low-level layer planning the standard path between any two intermediate points, and the high-level fashion determining their visiting sequence. First, the optimal standard path in terms of voyage time and risk measure is planned by the BMC protocol, given that the corresponding graph is constructed with node state and edge weight. The USV will avoid obstacles or keep a certain distance safely, and arrive at the target point quickly. It is proven theoretically that the state of the graph will converge to be stable after finite iterations, i.e., the optimal solution can be found by BMC with low calculation complexity. Second, by incorporating the constraint of intermediate points, their visiting sequence is optimized by BMC again with the reconstruction of a new virtual graph based on the former planned results. The extensive simulation results in various scenarios also validate the feasibility and effectiveness of our method for autonomous navigation.

Energy Minimization in Internet-of-Things System Based on Rotary-Wing UAV In this letter, we study unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) enabled Internet-of-Things (IoT) system, where a rotary-wing UAV is employed to collect data from a set of IoT devices. By introducing the propulsion energy model for rotary-wing UAV, we aim to minimize the maximum energy consumption among all devices, while satisfying the UAV energy budget. The problem is formulated with a non-convex programming by jointly optimizing the communication scheduling and transmit power allocation for devices as well as the UAV trajectory. An efficient solution is proposed by applying the alternating optimization and successive convex approximation techniques. Simulation results show that the proposed solution can achieve significant gains over benchmark schemes for data collection over IoT system.

A Comprehensive Survey on Internet of Things (IoT) Toward 5G Wireless Systems Recently, wireless technologies have been growing actively all around the world. In the context of wireless technology, fifth-generation (5G) technology has become a most challenging and interesting topic in wireless research. This article provides an overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) in 5G wireless systems. IoT in the 5G system will be a game changer in the future generation. It will open a door for new wireless architecture and smart services. Recent cellular network LTE (4G) will not be sufficient and efficient to meet the demands of multiple device connectivity and high data rate, more bandwidth, low-latency quality of service (QoS), and low interference. To address these challenges, we consider 5G as the most promising technology. We provide a detailed overview of challenges and vision of various communication industries in 5G IoT systems. The different layers in 5G IoT systems are discussed in detail. This article provides a comprehensive review on emerging and enabling technologies related to the 5G system that enables IoT. We consider the technology drivers for 5G wireless technology, such as 5G new radio (NR), multiple-input–multiple-output antenna with the beamformation technology, mm-wave commutation technology, heterogeneous networks (HetNets), the role of augmented reality (AR) in IoT, which are discussed in detail. We also provide a review on low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs), security challenges, and its control measure in the 5G IoT scenario. This article introduces the role of AR in the 5G IoT scenario. This article also discusses the research gaps and future directions. The focus is also on application areas of IoT in 5G systems. We, therefore, outline some of the important research directions in 5G IoT.

The Internet of Things: A survey This paper addresses the Internet of Things. Main enabling factor of this promising paradigm is the integration of several technologies and communications solutions. Identification and tracking technologies, wired and wireless sensor and actuator networks, enhanced communication protocols (shared with the Next Generation Internet), and distributed intelligence for smart objects are just the most relevant. As one can easily imagine, any serious contribution to the advance of the Internet of Things must necessarily be the result of synergetic activities conducted in different fields of knowledge, such as telecommunications, informatics, electronics and social science. In such a complex scenario, this survey is directed to those who want to approach this complex discipline and contribute to its development. Different visions of this Internet of Things paradigm are reported and enabling technologies reviewed. What emerges is that still major issues shall be faced by the research community. The most relevant among them are addressed in details.

Resource Allocation for Wireless-Powered IoT Networks With Short Packet Communication Internet-of-Things (IoT) is a promising technology to connect massive machines and devices in the future communication networks. In this paper, we study a wireless-powered IoT network (WPIN) with short packet communication (SPC), in which a hybrid access point (HAP) first transmits power to the IoT devices wirelessly, then the devices in turn transmit their short data packets achieved by finite blocklength codes to the HAP using the harvested energy. Different from the long packet communication in conventional wireless network, SPC suffers from transmission rate degradation and a significant packet error rate. Thus, conventional resource allocation in the existing literature based on Shannon capacity achieved by the infinite blocklength codes is no longer optimal. In this paper, to enhance the transmission efficiency and reliability, we first define <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">effective-throughput</italic> and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">effective-amount-of-information</italic> as the performance metrics to balance the transmission rate and the packet error rate, and then jointly optimize the transmission time and packet error rate of each user to maximize the total effective-throughput or minimize the total transmission time subject to the users’ individual effective-amount-of-information requirements. To overcome the non-convexity of the formulated problems, we develop efficient algorithms to find high-quality suboptimal solutions for them. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can achieve similar performances as that of the optimal solution via exhaustive search, and outperform the benchmark schemes.

3D Trajectory and Transmit Power Optimization for UAV-Enabled Multi-Link Relaying Systems Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the advantages of high mobility, remarkable versatility, and on-demand deployment, which lead to their wide applications in various industries. In disasters or other emergency events, UAV-enabled relaying can provide a temporary wireless connection for the affected area. Thus, a UAV-enabled multi-link relaying system is considered in this article, where multiple sources communicate with their destinations via multiple UAV relays at the same time sharing the same spectrum. Considering the interference between any two source-UAV relay-destination links, we propose to maximize the minimum throughput of all links by jointly optimizing the UAV relays' three-dimension (3D) trajectories and the sources and UAV relays' transmit power levels. As the considered problem is non-convex, we propose an iterative algorithm to solve it by applying the block coordinate ascent technique, which optimizes the UAV trajectories and the transmit power alternately until reaching convergence. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms the benchmark algorithms in terms of all links' minimum throughput, and demonstrate the necessity of jointly optimizing the 3D UAV trajectories and transmit power for interference mitigation in a UAV-enabled multi-link relaying system.

Age of Information: An Introduction and Survey We summarize recent contributions in the broad area of age of information (AoI). In particular, we describe the current state of the art in the design and optimization of low-latency cyberphysical systems and applications in which sources send time-stamped status updates to interested recipients. These applications desire status updates at the recipients to be as timely as possible; however, this ...

Energy-Efficient UAV enabled Data Collection via Wireless Charging: A Reinforcement Learning Approach In this article, we study the application of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for data collection with wireless charging, which is crucial for providing seamless coverage and improving system performance in the next-generation wireless networks. To this end, we propose a reinforcement learning-based approach to plan the route of UAV to collect sensor data from sensor devices scattered in the physical...

A Low-Complexity Analytical Modeling for Cross-Layer Adaptive Error Protection in Video Over WLAN We find a low-complicity and accurate model to solve the problem of optimizing MAC-layer transmission of real-time video over wireless local area networks (WLANs) using cross-layer techniques. The objective in this problem is to obtain the optimal MAC retry limit in order to minimize the total packet loss rate. First, the accuracy of Fluid and M/M/1/K analytical models is examined. Then we derive a closed-form expression for service time in WLAN MAC transmission, and will use this in mathematical formulation of our optimization problem based on M/G/1 model. Subsequently we introduce an approximate and simple formula for MAC-layer service time, which leads to the M/M/1 model. Compared with M/G/1, we particularly show that our M/M/1-based model provides a low-complexity and yet quite accurate means for analyzing MAC transmission process in WLAN. Using our M/M/1 model-based analysis, we derive closed-form formulas for the packet overflow drop rate and optimum retry-limit. These closed-form expressions can be effectively invoked for analyzing adaptive retry-limit algorithms. Simulation results (network simulator-2) will verify the accuracy of our analytical models.

Multi-Armed Bandit-Based Client Scheduling for Federated Learning By exploiting the computing power and local data of distributed clients, federated learning (FL) features ubiquitous properties such as reduction of communication overhead and preserving data privacy. In each communication round of FL, the clients update local models based on their own data and upload their local updates via wireless channels. However, latency caused by hundreds to thousands of communication rounds remains a bottleneck in FL. To minimize the training latency, this work provides a multi-armed bandit-based framework for online client scheduling (CS) in FL without knowing wireless channel state information and statistical characteristics of clients. Firstly, we propose a CS algorithm based on the upper confidence bound policy (CS-UCB) for ideal scenarios where local datasets of clients are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and balanced. An upper bound of the expected performance regret of the proposed CS-UCB algorithm is provided, which indicates that the regret grows logarithmically over communication rounds. Then, to address non-ideal scenarios with non-i.i.d. and unbalanced properties of local datasets and varying availability of clients, we further propose a CS algorithm based on the UCB policy and virtual queue technique (CS-UCB-Q). An upper bound is also derived, which shows that the expected performance regret of the proposed CS-UCB-Q algorithm can have a sub-linear growth over communication rounds under certain conditions. Besides, the convergence performance of FL training is also analyzed. Finally, simulation results validate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.

Image forgery detection We are undoubtedly living in an age where we are exposed to a remarkable array of visual imagery. While we may have historically had confidence in the integrity of this imagery, today&#39;s digital technology has begun to erode this trust. From the tabloid magazines to the fashion industry and in mainstream media outlets, scientific journals, political campaigns, courtrooms, and the photo hoaxes that ...

Toward Social Learning Environments We are teaching a new generation of students, cradled in technologies, communication and abundance of information. The implications are that we need to focus the design of learning technologies to support social learning in context. Instead of designing technologies that “teach” the learner, the new social learning technologies will perform three main roles: 1) support the learner in finding the right content (right for the context, for the particular learner, for the specific purpose of the learner, right pedagogically); 2) support learners to connect with the right people (again right for the context, learner, purpose, educational goal etc.), and 3) motivate / incentivize people to learn. In the pursuit of such environments, new areas of sciences become relevant as a source of methods and techniques: social psychology, economic / game theory, multi-agent systems. The paper illustrates how social learning technologies can be designed using some existing and emerging technologies: ontologies vs. social tagging, exploratory search, collaborative vs. self-managed social recommendations, trust and reputation mechanisms, mechanism design and social visualization.

Bessel-Fourier moment-based robust image zero-watermarking iming to resist various signal processing operations and geometric transformations, this paper proposes a robust zero-watermarking algorithm based on a new image moment called Bessel-Fourier moment. First, image normalization is used for the invariance of translation and scaling, then the magnitudes of Bessel-Fourier moments of normalized image are computed, which have rotation invariance and are used to construct the feature image regarded as watermarking. Experimental results and analyses show that the proposed method has strong robustness to various attacks, such as blurring, JPEG compression, Gaussian noise, rotation, scaling, Stirmark and print_photocopy_scan. Compared to the congener zero-watermarking schemes and Zernike moment, the developed method has better performance.

Deep Learning in Mobile and Wireless Networking: A Survey. The rapid uptake of mobile devices and the rising popularity of mobile applications and services pose unprecedented demands on mobile and wireless networking infrastructure. Upcoming 5G systems are evolving to support exploding mobile traffic volumes, real-time extraction of fine-grained analytics, and agile management of network resources, so as to maximize user experience. Fulfilling these tasks is challenging, as mobile environments are increasingly complex, heterogeneous, and evolving. One potential solution is to resort to advanced machine learning techniques, in order to help manage the rise in data volumes and algorithm-driven applications. The recent success of deep learning underpins new and powerful tools that tackle problems in this space. In this paper we bridge the gap between deep learning and mobile and wireless networking research, by presenting a comprehensive survey of the crossovers between the two areas. We first briefly introduce essential background and state-of-the-art in deep learning techniques with potential applications to networking. We then discuss several techniques and platforms that facilitate the efficient deployment of deep learning onto mobile systems. Subsequently, we provide an encyclopedic review of mobile and wireless networking research based on deep learning, which we categorize by different domains. Drawing from our experience, we discuss how to tailor deep learning to mobile environments. We complete this survey by pinpointing current challenges and open future directions for research.

A Hierarchical Architecture Using Biased Min-Consensus for USV Path Planning This paper proposes a hierarchical architecture using the biased min-consensus (BMC) method, to solve the path planning problem of unmanned surface vessel (USV). We take the fixed-point monitoring mission as an example, where a series of intermediate monitoring points should be visited once by USV. The whole framework incorporates the low-level layer planning the standard path between any two intermediate points, and the high-level fashion determining their visiting sequence. First, the optimal standard path in terms of voyage time and risk measure is planned by the BMC protocol, given that the corresponding graph is constructed with node state and edge weight. The USV will avoid obstacles or keep a certain distance safely, and arrive at the target point quickly. It is proven theoretically that the state of the graph will converge to be stable after finite iterations, i.e., the optimal solution can be found by BMC with low calculation complexity. Second, by incorporating the constraint of intermediate points, their visiting sequence is optimized by BMC again with the reconstruction of a new virtual graph based on the former planned results. The extensive simulation results in various scenarios also validate the feasibility and effectiveness of our method for autonomous navigation.

Hafez: An Interactive Poetry Generation System Hafez is an automatic poetry generation system that integrates a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with a Finite State Acceptor (FSA). It generates sonnets given arbitrary topics. Furthermore, Hafez enables users to revise and polish generated poems by adjusting various style configurations. Experiments demonstrate that such "polish" mechanisms consider the user's intention and lead to a better poem. For evaluation, we build a web interface where users can rate the quality of each poem from 1 to 5 stars. We also speed up the whole system by a factor of 10, via vocabulary pruning and GPU computation, so that adequate feedback can be collected at a fast pace. Based on such feedback, the system learns to adjust its parameters to improve poetry quality.

Tie-breaker: Using language models to quantify gender bias in sports journalism. Gender bias is an increasingly important issue in sports journalism. In this work, we propose a language-model-based approach to quantify differences in questions posed to female vs. male athletes, and apply it to tennis post-match interviews. We find that journalists ask male players questions that are generally more focused on the game when compared with the questions they ask their female counterparts. We also provide a fine-grained analysis of the extent to which the salience of this bias depends on various factors, such as question type, game outcome or player rank.

Reducing Gender Bias in Abusive Language Detection. Abusive language detection models tend to have a problem of being biased toward identity words of a certain group of people because of imbalanced training datasets. For example, You are a good woman was considered sexist when trained on an existing dataset. Such model bias is an obstacle for models to be robust enough for practical use. In this work, we measure gender biases on models trained with different abusive language datasets, while analyzing the effect of different pre-trained word embeddings and model architectures. We also experiment with three bias mitigation methods: (1) debiased word embeddings, (2) gender swap data augmentation, and (3) fine-tuning with a larger corpus. These methods can effectively reduce gender bias by 90-98% and can be extended to correct model bias in other scenarios.

Plug and Play Language Models: A Simple Approach to Controlled Text Generation Large transformer-based language models (LMs) trained on huge text corpora have shown unparalleled generation capabilities. However, controlling attributes of the generated language (e.g. switching topic or sentiment) is difficult without modifying the model architecture or fine-tuning on attribute-specific data and entailing the significant cost of retraining. We propose a simple alternative: the Plug and Play Language Model (PPLM) for controllable language generation, which combines a pretrained LM with one or more simple attribute classifiers that guide text generation without any further training of the LM. In the canonical scenario we present, the attribute models are simple classifiers consisting of a user-specified bag of words or a single learned layer with 100,000 times fewer parameters than the LM. Sampling entails a forward and backward pass in which gradients from the attribute model push the LM's hidden activations and thus guide the generation. Model samples demonstrate control over a range of topics and sentiment styles, and extensive automated and human annotated evaluations show attribute alignment and fluency. PPLMs are flexible in that any combination of differentiable attribute models may be used to steer text generation, which will allow for diverse and creative applications beyond the examples given in this paper.

Gender Bias in Neural Natural Language Processing. We examine whether neural natural language processing (NLP) systems reflect historical biases in training data. We define a general benchmark to quantify gender bias in a variety of neural NLP tasks. Our empirical evaluation with state-of-the-art neural coreference resolution and textbook RNN-based language models trained on benchmark datasets finds significant gender bias in how models view occupations. We then mitigate bias with CDA: a generic methodology for corpus augmentation via causal interventions that breaks associations between gendered and gender-neutral words. We empirically show that CDA effectively decreases gender bias while preserving accuracy. We also explore the space of mitigation strategies with CDA, a prior approach to word embedding debiasing (WED), and their compositions. We show that CDA outperforms WED, drastically so when word embeddings are trained. For pre-trained embeddings, the two methods can be effectively composed. We also find that as training proceeds on the original data set with gradient descent the gender bias grows as the loss reduces, indicating that the optimization encourages bias; CDA mitigates this behavior.

BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding. We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models, is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained representations can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifications. BERT is conceptually simple and empirically powerful. It obtains new state-of-the-art results on eleven natural language processing tasks, including pushing the GLUE benchmark to 80.4% (7.6% absolute improvement), MultiNLI accuracy to 86.7 (5.6% absolute improvement) and the SQuAD v1.1 question answering Test F1 to 93.2 (1.5% absolute improvement), outperforming human performance by 2.0%.

Get To The Point: Summarization With Pointer-Generator Networks Neural sequence-to-sequence models have provided a viable new approach for abstractive text summarization (meaning they are not restricted to simply selecting and rearranging passages from the original text). However, these models have two shortcomings: they are liable to reproduce factual details inaccurately, and they tend to repeat themselves. In this work we propose a novel architecture that augments the standard sequence-to-sequence attentional model in two orthogonal ways. First, we use a hybrid pointer-generator network that can copy words from the source text via pointing, which aids accurate reproduction of information, while retaining the ability to produce novel words through the generator. Second, we use coverage to keep track of what has been summarized, which discourages repetition. We apply our model to the CNN / Daily Mail summarization task, outperforming the current abstractive state-of-the-art by at least 2 ROUGE points.

On the security of public key protocols Recently the use of public key encryption to provide secure network communication has received considerable attention. Such public key systems are usually effective against passive eavesdroppers, who merely tap the lines and try to decipher the message. It has been pointed out, however, that an improperly designed protocol could be vulnerable to an active saboteur, one who may impersonate another user or alter the message being transmitted. Several models are formulated in which the security of protocols can be discussed precisely. Algorithms and characterizations that can be used to determine protocol security in these models are given.

Adaptive Federated Learning in Resource Constrained Edge Computing Systems Emerging technologies and applications including Internet of Things, social networking, and crowd-sourcing generate large amounts of data at the network edge. Machine learning models are often built from the collected data, to enable the detection, classification, and prediction of future events. Due to bandwidth, storage, and privacy concerns, it is often impractical to send all the data to a cen...

Image forgery detection We are undoubtedly living in an age where we are exposed to a remarkable array of visual imagery. While we may have historically had confidence in the integrity of this imagery, today&#39;s digital technology has begun to erode this trust. From the tabloid magazines to the fashion industry and in mainstream media outlets, scientific journals, political campaigns, courtrooms, and the photo hoaxes that ...

Development of a UAV-LiDAR System with Application to Forest Inventory We present the development of a low-cost Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Light Detecting and Ranging (UAV-LiDAR) system and an accompanying workflow to produce 3D point clouds. UAV systems provide an unrivalled combination of high temporal and spatial resolution datasets. The TerraLuma UAV-LiDAR system has been developed to take advantage of these properties and in doing so overcome some of the current limitations of the use of this technology within the forestry industry. A modified processing workflow including a novel trajectory determination algorithm fusing observations from a GPS receiver, an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and a High Definition (HD) video camera is presented. The advantages of this workflow are demonstrated using a rigorous assessment of the spatial accuracy of the final point clouds. It is shown that due to the inclusion of video the horizontal accuracy of the final point cloud improves from 0.61 m to 0.34 m (RMS error assessed against ground control). The effect of the very high density point clouds (up to 62 points per m(2)) produced by the UAV-LiDAR system on the measurement of tree location, height and crown width are also assessed by performing repeat surveys over individual isolated trees. The standard deviation of tree height is shown to reduce from 0.26 m, when using data with a density of 8 points per m(2), to 0.15 m when the higher density data was used. Improvements in the uncertainty of the measurement of tree location, 0.80 m to 0.53 m, and crown width, 0.69 m to 0.61 m are also shown.

Mobile Data Gathering with Load Balanced Clustering and Dual Data Uploading in Wireless Sensor Networks In this paper, a three-layer framework is proposed for mobile data collection in wireless sensor networks, which includes the sensor layer, cluster head layer, and mobile collector (called SenCar) layer. The framework employs distributed load balanced clustering and dual data uploading, which is referred to as LBC-DDU. The objective is to achieve good scalability, long network lifetime and low data collection latency. At the sensor layer, a distributed load balanced clustering (LBC) algorithm is proposed for sensors to self-organize themselves into clusters. In contrast to existing clustering methods, our scheme generates multiple cluster heads in each cluster to balance the work load and facilitate dual data uploading. At the cluster head layer, the inter-cluster transmission range is carefully chosen to guarantee the connectivity among the clusters. Multiple cluster heads within a cluster cooperate with each other to perform energy-saving inter-cluster communications. Through inter-cluster transmissions, cluster head information is forwarded to SenCar for its moving trajectory planning. At the mobile collector layer, SenCar is equipped with two antennas, which enables two cluster heads to simultaneously upload data to SenCar in each time by utilizing multi-user multiple-input and multiple-output (MU-MIMO) technique. The trajectory planning for SenCar is optimized to fully utilize dual data uploading capability by properly selecting polling points in each cluster. By visiting each selected polling point, SenCar can efficiently gather data from cluster heads and transport the data to the static data sink. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed LBC-DDU scheme. The results show that when each cluster has at most two cluster heads, LBC-DDU achieves over 50 percent energy saving per node and 60 percent energy saving on cluster heads comparing with data collection through multi-hop relay to the static data sink, and 20 percent - horter data collection time compared to traditional mobile data gathering.

An evolutionary programming approach for securing medical images using watermarking scheme in invariant discrete wavelet transformation. •The proposed watermarking scheme utilized improved discrete wavelet transformation (IDWT) to retrieve the invariant wavelet domain.•The entropy mechanism is used to identify the suitable region for insertion of watermark. This will improve the imperceptibility and robustness of the watermarking procedure.•The scaling factors such as PSNR and NC are considered for evaluation of the proposed method and the Particle Swarm Optimization is employed to optimize the scaling factors.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

PeloPartition: Improving Blockchain Resilience to Network Partitioning Blockchain has gained considerable traction over the last few years and plays a critical role in realizing decentralized and cryptocurrency applications. A challenge that has been over-looked in prior blockchain algorithms is that they do not consider large-scale network outages and relied on the assumption of a reliable global network connectivity. In the event of a large scale network partition, forks may occur between partitioned regions. After the partition ends they will be discarded, leading to the loss of many blocks and a considerable amount of wasted work. This paper presents PeloPartition, which provides a sharding mechanism to improve blockchain's resilience to the possibility of a global internet outage. In PeloPartition we form consensus groups dynamically and consider the partitioning of the group as a hint to split the blockchain into branches and guarantee that all of them will be merged after the network is recovered. We indicate different methodologies to ensure blockchain security while partitioning occurs. Our experiments use simulations to show how this approach can improve the performance of blockchain algorithms and prevent wasted computational power during partitioning.

A detailed and real-time performance monitoring framework for blockchain systems. Blockchain systems, with the characteristics of decentralization, irreversibility and traceability, have attracted a lot of attentions recently. However, the current performance of blockchain is poor, which becomes a major constraint of its applications. Additionally, different blockchain systems lack standard performance monitoring approach which can automatically adapt to different systems and provide detailed and real-time performance information. To solve this problem, we propose overall performance metrics and detailed performance metrics for the users to know the exact performance in different stages of the blockchain. Then we propose a performance monitoring framework with a log-based method. It has advantages of lower overhead, more details, and better scalability than the previous performance monitoring approaches. Finally we implement the framework to monitor four well-known blockchain systems, using a set of 1,000 open-source smart contracts. The experimental results show that our framework can make detailed and real-time performance monitoring of blockchain systems. We also provide some suggestions for the future development of blockchain systems.

Fork Rate-Based Analysis of the Longest Chain Growth Time Interval of a PoW Blockchain Nakamoto's consensus protocol, which is well known for its resistance to sybil attacks by using PoW (Proof of Work), enables us to build public blockchains, such as Bitcoin. In this protocol, miners seek to extend the longest chain by solving blockhash-based cryptographic puzzles and the required time is probabilistically determined. Therefore, the distribution of the time interval affects security, performance and applications which utilize the block height information. Some researchers assumed that the time follows an exponential distribution but this assumption requires that the blockchain network is fully synchronized. To overcome this unreal scenario, the bounded delay model, in which there is an upper bound for block propagation delay on the network, was proposed. However, it is difficult to calculate the upper bound without observing delay and bandwidth on real-world network links. To solve this problem, we proposed another method to analyze the distribution of the longest chain growth time interval by using the observed fork rate. We derived a closed-form lower bound for the CDF (Cumulative Distribution Function) of the time to update the global block height. We also obtained the Pearson distance which can be used as the metric to judge whether the network is approximately synchronous or not. Finally, we conducted network simulations for comparing our lower bound with the lower bound that is based on the bounded delay model. In numerical examples, we show how the block size affects these lower bounds.

Identifying Impacts of Protocol and Internet Development on the Bitcoin Network Improving transaction throughput is an important challenge for Bitcoin. However, shortening the block generation interval or increasing the block size to improve throughput makes it sharing blocks within the network slower and increases the number of orphan blocks. Consequently, the security of the blockchain is sacrificed. To mitigate this, it is necessary to reduce the block propagation delay. Because of the contribution of new Bitcoin protocols and the improvements of the Internet, the block propagation delay in the Bitcoin network has been shortened in recent years. In this study, we identify impacts of compact block relay—an up-to-date Bitcoin protocol—and Internet improvement on the block propagation delay and fork rate in the Bitcoin network from 2015 to 2019. Existing measurement studies could not identify them but our simulation enables it. The experimental results reveal that compact block relay contributes to shortening the block propagation delay more than Internet improvements. The block propagation delay is reduced by 64.5% for the 50th percentile and 63.7% for the 90th percentile due to Internet improvements, and by 90.1% for the 50th percentile and by 87.6% for the 90th percentile due to compact block relay.

A Secure Sharding Protocol For Open Blockchains. Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and 250 similar alt-coins, embody at their core a blockchain protocol --- a mechanism for a distributed network of computational nodes to periodically agree on a set of new transactions. Designing a secure blockchain protocol relies on an open challenge in security, that of designing a highly-scalable agreement protocol open to manipulation by byzantine or arbitrarily malicious nodes. Bitcoin's blockchain agreement protocol exhibits security, but does not scale: it processes 3--7 transactions per second at present, irrespective of the available computation capacity at hand. In this paper, we propose a new distributed agreement protocol for permission-less blockchains called ELASTICO. ELASTICO scales transaction rates almost linearly with available computation for mining: the more the computation power in the network, the higher the number of transaction blocks selected per unit time. ELASTICO is efficient in its network messages and tolerates byzantine adversaries of up to one-fourth of the total computational power. Technically, ELASTICO uniformly partitions or parallelizes the mining network (securely) into smaller committees, each of which processes a disjoint set of transactions (or \"shards\"). While sharding is common in non-byzantine settings, ELASTICO is the first candidate for a secure sharding protocol with presence of byzantine adversaries. Our scalability experiments on Amazon EC2 with up to $1, 600$ nodes confirm ELASTICO's theoretical scaling properties.

Completely derandomized self-adaptation in evolution strategies. This paper puts forward two useful methods for self-adaptation of the mutation distribution - the concepts of derandomization and cumulation. Principle shortcomings of the concept of mutative strategy parameter control and two levels of derandomization are reviewed. Basic demands on the self-adaptation of arbitrary (normal) mutation distributions are developed. Applying arbitrary, normal mutation distributions is equivalent to applying a general, linear problem encoding. The underlying objective of mutative strategy parameter control is roughly to favor previously selected mutation steps in the future. If this objective is pursued rigorously, a completely derandomized self-adaptation scheme results, which adapts arbitrary normal mutation distributions. This scheme, called covariance matrix adaptation (CMA), meets the previously stated demands. It can still be considerably improved by cumulation - utilizing an evolution path rather than single search steps. Simulations on various test functions reveal local and global search properties of the evolution strategy with and without covariance matrix adaptation. Their performances are comparable only on perfectly scaled functions. On badly scaled, non-separable functions usually a speed up factor of several orders of magnitude is observed. On moderately mis-scaled functions a speed up factor of three to ten can be expected.

Hiding Traces of Resampling in Digital Images Resampling detection has become a standard tool for forensic analyses of digital images. This paper presents new variants of image transformation operations which are undetectable by resampling detectors based on periodic variations in the residual signal of local linear predictors in the spatial domain. The effectiveness of the proposed method is supported with evidence from experiments on a large image database for various parameter settings. We benchmark detectability as well as the resulting image quality against conventional linear and bicubic interpolation and interpolation with a sinc kernel. These early findings on ldquocounter-forensicrdquo techniques put into question the reliability of known forensic tools against smart counterfeiters in general, and might serve as benchmarks and motivation for the development of much improved forensic techniques.

Fog computing and its role in the internet of things Fog Computing extends the Cloud Computing paradigm to the edge of the network, thus enabling a new breed of applications and services. Defining characteristics of the Fog are: a) Low latency and location awareness; b) Wide-spread geographical distribution; c) Mobility; d) Very large number of nodes, e) Predominant role of wireless access, f) Strong presence of streaming and real time applications, g) Heterogeneity. In this paper we argue that the above characteristics make the Fog the appropriate platform for a number of critical Internet of Things (IoT) services and applications, namely, Connected Vehicle, Smart Grid, Smart Cities, and, in general, Wireless Sensors and Actuators Networks (WSANs).

GameFlow: a model for evaluating player enjoyment in games Although player enjoyment is central to computer games, there is currently no accepted model of player enjoyment in games. There are many heuristics in the literature, based on elements such as the game interface, mechanics, gameplay, and narrative. However, there is a need to integrate these heuristics into a validated model that can be used to design, evaluate, and understand enjoyment in games. We have drawn together the various heuristics into a concise model of enjoyment in games that is structured by flow. Flow, a widely accepted model of enjoyment, includes eight elements that, we found, encompass the various heuristics from the literature. Our new model, GameFlow, consists of eight elements -- concentration, challenge, skills, control, clear goals, feedback, immersion, and social interaction. Each element includes a set of criteria for achieving enjoyment in games. An initial investigation and validation of the GameFlow model was carried out by conducting expert reviews of two real-time strategy games, one high-rating and one low-rating, using the GameFlow criteria. The result was a deeper understanding of enjoyment in real-time strategy games and the identification of the strengths and weaknesses of the GameFlow model as an evaluation tool. The GameFlow criteria were able to successfully distinguish between the high-rated and low-rated games and identify why one succeeded and the other failed. We concluded that the GameFlow model can be used in its current form to review games; further work will provide tools for designing and evaluating enjoyment in games.

Adapting visual category models to new domains Domain adaptation is an important emerging topic in computer vision. In this paper, we present one of the first studies of domain shift in the context of object recognition. We introduce a method that adapts object models acquired in a particular visual domain to new imaging conditions by learning a transformation that minimizes the effect of domain-induced changes in the feature distribution. The transformation is learned in a supervised manner and can be applied to categories for which there are no labeled examples in the new domain. While we focus our evaluation on object recognition tasks, the transform-based adaptation technique we develop is general and could be applied to nonimage data. Another contribution is a new multi-domain object database, freely available for download. We experimentally demonstrate the ability of our method to improve recognition on categories with few or no target domain labels and moderate to large changes in the imaging conditions.

A Web-Based Tool For Control Engineering Teaching In this article a new tool for control engineering teaching is presented. The tool was implemented using Java applets and is freely accessible through Web. It allows the analysis and simulation of linear control systems and was created to complement the theoretical lectures in basic control engineering courses. The article is not only centered in the description of the tool but also in the methodology to use it and its evaluation in an electrical engineering degree. Two practical problems are included in the manuscript to illustrate the use of the main functions implemented. The developed web-based tool can be accessed through the link http://www.controlweb.cyc.ull.es. (C) 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Adaptive Consensus Control for a Class of Nonlinear Multiagent Time-Delay Systems Using Neural Networks Because of the complicity of consensus control of nonlinear multiagent systems in state time-delay, most of previous works focused only on linear systems with input time-delay. An adaptive neural network (NN) consensus control method for a class of nonlinear multiagent systems with state time-delay is proposed in this paper. The approximation property of radial basis function neural networks (RBFNNs) is used to neutralize the uncertain nonlinear dynamics in agents. An appropriate Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional, which is obtained from the derivative of an appropriate Lyapunov function, is used to compensate the uncertainties of unknown time delays. It is proved that our proposed approach guarantees the convergence on the basis of Lyapunov stability theory. The simulation results of a nonlinear multiagent time-delay system and a multiple collaborative manipulators system show the effectiveness of the proposed consensus control algorithm.

Inter-class sparsity based discriminative least square regression Least square regression is a very popular supervised classification method. However, two main issues greatly limit its performance. The first one is that it only focuses on fitting the input features to the corresponding output labels while ignoring the correlations among samples. The second one is that the used label matrix, i.e., zero–one label matrix is inappropriate for classification. To solve these problems and improve the performance, this paper presents a novel method, i.e., inter-class sparsity based discriminative least square regression (ICS_DLSR), for multi-class classification. Different from other methods, the proposed method pursues that the transformed samples have a common sparsity structure in each class. For this goal, an inter-class sparsity constraint is introduced to the least square regression model such that the margins of samples from the same class can be greatly reduced while those of samples from different classes can be enlarged. In addition, an error term with row-sparsity constraint is introduced to relax the strict zero–one label matrix, which allows the method to be more flexible in learning the discriminative transformation matrix. These factors encourage the method to learn a more compact and discriminative transformation for regression and thus has the potential to perform better than other methods. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the best performance in comparison with other methods for multi-class classification.

Attitudes Towards Social Robots In Education: Enthusiast, Practical, Troubled, Sceptic, And Mindfully Positive While social robots bring new opportunities for education, they also come with moral challenges. Therefore, there is a need for moral guidelines for the responsible implementation of these robots. When developing such guidelines, it is important to include different stakeholder perspectives. Existing (qualitative) studies regarding these perspectives however mainly focus on single stakeholders. In this exploratory study, we examine and compare the attitudes of multiple stakeholders on the use of social robots in primary education, using a novel questionnaire that covers various aspects of moral issues mentioned in earlier studies. Furthermore, we also group the stakeholders based on similarities in attitudes and examine which socio-demographic characteristics influence these attitude types. Based on the results, we identify five distinct attitude profiles and show that the probability of belonging to a specific profile is affected by such characteristics as stakeholder type, age, education and income. Our results also indicate that social robots have the potential to be implemented in education in a morally responsible way that takes into account the attitudes of various stakeholders, although there are multiple moral issues that need to be addressed first. Finally, we present seven (practical) implications for a responsible application of social robots in education following from our results. These implications provide valuable insights into how social robots should be implemented.

Neural Data-Driven Musculoskeletal Modeling for Personalized Neurorehabilitation Technologies. Objectives: The development of neurorehabilitation technologies requires the profound understanding of the mechanisms underlying an individual&#39;s motor ability and impairment. A major factor limiting this understanding is the difficulty of bridging between events taking place at the neurophysiologic level (i.e., motor neuron firings) with those emerging at the musculoskeletal level (i.e. joint actu...

Robust Real-Time Musculoskeletal Modeling Driven by Electromyograms. Objective: Current clinical biomechanics involves lengthy data acquisition and time-consuming offline analyses with biomechanical models not operating in real-time for man-machine interfacing. We developed a method that enables online analysis of neuromusculoskeletal function in vivo in the intact human. Methods: We used electromyography (EMG)-driven musculoskeletal modeling to simulate all transf...

Higher Order Tensor Decomposition For Proportional Myoelectric Control Based On Muscle Synergies Muscle synergies have recently been utilised in myoelectric control systems. Thus far, all proposed synergy-based systems rely on matrix factorisation methods. However, this is limited in terms of task-dimensionality. Here, the potential application of higher-order tensor decomposition as a framework for proportional myoelectric control is demonstrated. A novel constrained Tucker decomposition (consTD) technique of synergy extraction is proposed for synergy-based myoelectric control model and compared with state-of-the-art matrix factorisation models. The extracted synergies were used to estimate control signals for the wrist?s Degree of Freedom (DoF) through direct projection. The consTD model was able to estimate the control signals for each DoF by utilising all data in one 3rd-order tensor. This is contrast with matrix factorisation models where data are segmented for each DoF and then the synergies often have to be realigned. Moreover, the consTD method offers more information by providing additional shared synergies, unlike matrix factorisation methods. The extracted control signals were fed to a ridge regression to estimate the wrist's kinematics based on real glove data. The Coefficient of Determination (R-2) for the reconstructed wrist position showed that the proposed consTD was higher than matrix factorisation methods. In sum, this study provides the first proof of concept for the use of higher-order tensor decomposition in proportional myoelectric control and it highlights the potential of tensors to provide an objective and direct approach to identify synergies.

Reinforcement learning of motor skills with policy gradients. Autonomous learning is one of the hallmarks of human and animal behavior, and understanding the principles of learning will be crucial in order to achieve true autonomy in advanced machines like humanoid robots. In this paper, we examine learning of complex motor skills with human-like limbs. While supervised learning can offer useful tools for bootstrapping behavior, e.g., by learning from demonstration, it is only reinforcement learning that offers a general approach to the final trial-and-error improvement that is needed by each individual acquiring a skill. Neither neurobiological nor machine learning studies have, so far, offered compelling results on how reinforcement learning can be scaled to the high-dimensional continuous state and action spaces of humans or humanoids. Here, we combine two recent research developments on learning motor control in order to achieve this scaling. First, we interpret the idea of modular motor control by means of motor primitives as a suitable way to generate parameterized control policies for reinforcement learning. Second, we combine motor primitives with the theory of stochastic policy gradient learning, which currently seems to be the only feasible framework for reinforcement learning for humanoids. We evaluate different policy gradient methods with a focus on their applicability to parameterized motor primitives. We compare these algorithms in the context of motor primitive learning, and show that our most modern algorithm, the Episodic Natural Actor-Critic outperforms previous algorithms by at least an order of magnitude. We demonstrate the efficiency of this reinforcement learning method in the application of learning to hit a baseball with an anthropomorphic robot arm.

Increasing exercise intensity during outside walking training with a wearable robot For many neuromuscular conditions including spinal cord injury, physical exercise training is a recommended part of treatment. High intensity exercise has been found to more effectively promote ambulatory function than moderate intensity exercise. To reach optimal intensity levels, fully ambulatory individuals can adjust their walking speed. In contrast, individuals with neuromuscular deficits may not be able to walk, or only at slow speeds that elicit an insufficient cardiovascular response.In our case study with one spinal cord injured patient, we investigated if assistance from a wearable robot, the Myosuit, can increase exercise intensity towards more effective training.During outside uphill-walking trials, assistance from the Myosuit allowed the patient to increase his walking speed by 30 % to 0.48 m/s and increased energy expenditure by 17 % compared to not wearing the suit. An analysis of gait kinematics suggests that the Myosuit facilitated faster walking by replacing missing hip extensor function and promoting a more upright posture. The metabolic equivalents (METS) during walking with the Myosuit of 7.15 indicate a consistently high exercise intensity. In contrast, one of two unassisted trials only reached a moderate intensity (METS < 6). The concurrent increase in speed and energy expenditure when wearing the Myosuit corresponds to a 9 % increase in the efficiency of walking.Our findings show that the Myosuit can increase the efficiency of walking for a user with incomplete spinal cord injury and suggest that the Myosuit can act as a tool to increase the efficacy of movement training.

Redundancy resolution of the human arm and an upper limb exoskeleton. The human arm has 7 degrees of freedom (DOF) while only 6 DOF are required to position the wrist and orient the palm. Thus, the inverse kinematics of an human arm has a nonunique solution. Resolving this redundancy becomes critical as the human interacts with a wearable robot and the inverse kinematics solution of these two coupled systems must be identical to guarantee an seamless integration. The redundancy of the arm can be formulated by defining the swivel angle, the rotation angle of the plane defined by the upper and lower arm around a virtual axis that connects the shoulder and wrist joints. Analyzing reaching tasks recorded with a motion capture system indicates that the swivel angle is selected such that when the elbow joint is flexed, the palm points to the head. Based on these experimental results, a new criterion is formed to resolve the human arm redundancy. This criterion was implemented into the control algorithm of an upper limb 7-DOF wearable robot. Experimental results indicate that by using the proposed redundancy resolution criterion, the error between the predicted and the actual swivel angle adopted by the motor control system is less then 5°.

A semi-active hybrid neuroprosthesis for restoring lower limb function in paraplegics. Through the application of functional electrical stimulation (FES) individuals with paraplegia can regain lost walking function. However, due to the rapid onset of muscle fatigue, the walking duration obtained with an FES-based neuroprosthesis is often relatively short. The rapid muscle fatigue can be compensated for by using a hybrid system that uses both FES and an active orthosis. In this paper, we demonstrate the initial testing of a semi-active hybrid walking neuroprosthesis. The semi-active hybrid orthosis (SEAHO) supports a user during the stance phase and standing while the electric motors attached to the hip section of the orthosis are used to generate hip flexion/extension. FES in SEAHO is mainly used to actuate knee flexion/extension and plantar flexion of the foot. SEAHO is controlled by a finite state machine that uses a recently developed nonlinear controller for position tracking control of the hip motors and cues from the hip angle to actuate FES and other components.

Footprints: history-rich tools for information foraging Inspired by Hill and Hollans original work [7], we have beendeveloping a theory of interaction history and building tools toapply this theory to navigation in a complex information space. Wehave built a series of tools - map, paths, annota- tions andsignposts - based on a physical-world navigation metaphor. Thesetools have been in use for over a year. Our user study involved acontrolled browse task and showed that users were able to get thesame amount of work done with significantly less effort.

No free lunch theorems for optimization A framework is developed to explore the connection between effective optimization algorithms and the problems they are solving. A number of “no free lunch” (NFL) theorems are presented which establish that for any algorithm, any elevated performance over one class of problems is offset by performance over another class. These theorems result in a geometric interpretation of what it means for an algorithm to be well suited to an optimization problem. Applications of the NFL theorems to information-theoretic aspects of optimization and benchmark measures of performance are also presented. Other issues addressed include time-varying optimization problems and a priori “head-to-head” minimax distinctions between optimization algorithms, distinctions that result despite the NFL theorems' enforcing of a type of uniformity over all algorithms

Social Perception and Steering for Online Avatars This paper presents work on a new platform for producing realistic group conversation dynamics in shared virtual environments. An avatar, representing users, should perceive the surrounding social environment just as humans would, and use the perceptual information for driving low level reactive behaviors. Unconscious reactions serve as evidence of life, and can also signal social availability and spatial awareness to others. These behaviors get lost when avatar locomotion requires explicit user control. For automating such behaviors we propose a steering layer in the avatars that manages a set of prioritized behaviors executed at different frequencies, which can be activated or deactivated and combined together. This approach gives us enough flexibility to model the group dynamics of social interactions as a set of social norms that activate relevant steering behaviors. A basic set of behaviors is described for conversations, some of which generate a social force field that makes the formation of conversation groups fluidly adapt to external and internal noise, through avatar repositioning and reorientations. The resulting social group behavior appears relatively robust, but perhaps more importantly, it starts to bring a new sense of relevance and continuity to the virtual bodies that often get separated from the ongoing conversation in the chat window.

Surrogate-assisted evolutionary computation: Recent advances and future challenges Surrogate-assisted, or meta-model based evolutionary computation uses efficient computational models, often known as surrogates or meta-models, for approximating the fitness function in evolutionary algorithms. Research on surrogate-assisted evolutionary computation began over a decade ago and has received considerably increasing interest in recent years. Very interestingly, surrogate-assisted evolutionary computation has found successful applications not only in solving computationally expensive single- or multi-objective optimization problems, but also in addressing dynamic optimization problems, constrained optimization problems and multi-modal optimization problems. This paper provides a concise overview of the history and recent developments in surrogate-assisted evolutionary computation and suggests a few future trends in this research area.

Mobile Data Gathering with Load Balanced Clustering and Dual Data Uploading in Wireless Sensor Networks In this paper, a three-layer framework is proposed for mobile data collection in wireless sensor networks, which includes the sensor layer, cluster head layer, and mobile collector (called SenCar) layer. The framework employs distributed load balanced clustering and dual data uploading, which is referred to as LBC-DDU. The objective is to achieve good scalability, long network lifetime and low data collection latency. At the sensor layer, a distributed load balanced clustering (LBC) algorithm is proposed for sensors to self-organize themselves into clusters. In contrast to existing clustering methods, our scheme generates multiple cluster heads in each cluster to balance the work load and facilitate dual data uploading. At the cluster head layer, the inter-cluster transmission range is carefully chosen to guarantee the connectivity among the clusters. Multiple cluster heads within a cluster cooperate with each other to perform energy-saving inter-cluster communications. Through inter-cluster transmissions, cluster head information is forwarded to SenCar for its moving trajectory planning. At the mobile collector layer, SenCar is equipped with two antennas, which enables two cluster heads to simultaneously upload data to SenCar in each time by utilizing multi-user multiple-input and multiple-output (MU-MIMO) technique. The trajectory planning for SenCar is optimized to fully utilize dual data uploading capability by properly selecting polling points in each cluster. By visiting each selected polling point, SenCar can efficiently gather data from cluster heads and transport the data to the static data sink. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed LBC-DDU scheme. The results show that when each cluster has at most two cluster heads, LBC-DDU achieves over 50 percent energy saving per node and 60 percent energy saving on cluster heads comparing with data collection through multi-hop relay to the static data sink, and 20 percent - horter data collection time compared to traditional mobile data gathering.

An efficient scheduling scheme for mobile charger in on-demand wireless rechargeable sensor networks. Existing studies on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have revealed that the limited battery capacity of sensor nodes (SNs) hinders their perpetual operation. Recent findings in the domain of wireless energy transfer (WET) have attracted a lot of attention of academia and industry to cater the lack of energy in the WSNs. The main idea of WET is to restore the energy of SNs using one or more wireless mobile chargers (MCs), which leads to a new paradigm of wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs). The determination of an optimal order of charging the SNs (i.e., charging schedule) in an on-demand WRSN is a well-known NP-hard problem. Moreover, care must be taken while designing the charging schedule of an MC as requesting SNs introduce both spatial and temporal constraints. In this paper, we first present a Linear Programming (LP) formulation for the problem of scheduling an MC and then propose an efficient solution based on gravitational search algorithm (GSA). Our method is presented with a novel agent representation scheme and an efficient fitness function. We perform extensive simulations on the proposed scheme to demonstrate its effectiveness over two state-of-the-art algorithms, namely first come first serve (FCFS) and nearest job next with preemption (NJNP). The simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme outperforms both the existing algorithms in terms of charging latency. The virtue of our scheme is also proved by the well-known statistical test, analysis of variance (ANOVA), followed by post hoc analysis.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Dragonfly algorithm: a new meta-heuristic optimization technique for solving single-objective, discrete, and multi-objective problems A novel swarm intelligence optimization technique is proposed called dragonfly algorithm (DA). The main inspiration of the DA algorithm originates from the static and dynamic swarming behaviours of dragonflies in nature. Two essential phases of optimization, exploration and exploitation, are designed by modelling the social interaction of dragonflies in navigating, searching for foods, and avoiding enemies when swarming dynamically or statistically. The paper also considers the proposal of binary and multi-objective versions of DA called binary DA (BDA) and multi-objective DA (MODA), respectively. The proposed algorithms are benchmarked by several mathematical test functions and one real case study qualitatively and quantitatively. The results of DA and BDA prove that the proposed algorithms are able to improve the initial random population for a given problem, converge towards the global optimum, and provide very competitive results compared to other well-known algorithms in the literature. The results of MODA also show that this algorithm tends to find very accurate approximations of Pareto optimal solutions with high uniform distribution for multi-objective problems. The set of designs obtained for the submarine propeller design problem demonstrate the merits of MODA in solving challenging real problems with unknown true Pareto optimal front as well. Note that the source codes of the DA, BDA, and MODA algorithms are publicly available at http://www.alimirjalili.com/DA.html.

Multi-stage genetic programming: A new strategy to nonlinear system modeling This paper presents a new multi-stage genetic programming (MSGP) strategy for modeling nonlinear systems. The proposed strategy is based on incorporating the individual effect of predictor variables and the interactions among them to provide more accurate simulations. According to the MSGP strategy, an efficient formulation for a problem comprises different terms. In the first stage of the MSGP-based analysis, the output variable is formulated in terms of an influencing variable. Thereafter, the error between the actual and the predicted value is formulated in terms of a new variable. Finally, the interaction term is derived by formulating the difference between the actual values and the values predicted by the individually developed terms. The capabilities of MSGP are illustrated by applying it to the formulation of different complex engineering problems. The problems analyzed herein include the following: (i) simulation of pH neutralization process, (ii) prediction of surface roughness in end milling, and (iii) classification of soil liquefaction conditions. The validity of the proposed strategy is confirmed by applying the derived models to the parts of the experimental results that were not included in the analyses. Further, the external validation of the models is verified using several statistical criteria recommended by other researchers. The MSGP-based solutions are capable of effectively simulating the nonlinear behavior of the investigated systems. The results of MSGP are found to be more accurate than those of standard GP and artificial neural network-based models.

An improved genetic algorithm with conditional genetic operators and its application to set-covering problem The genetic algorithm (GA) is a popular, biologically inspired optimization method. However, in the GA there is no rule of thumb to design the GA operators and select GA parameters. Instead, trial-and-error has to be applied. In this paper we present an improved genetic algorithm in which crossover and mutation are performed conditionally instead of probability. Because there are no crossover rate and mutation rate to be selected, the proposed improved GA can be more easily applied to a problem than the conventional genetic algorithms. The proposed improved genetic algorithm is applied to solve the set-covering problem. Experimental studies show that the improved GA produces better results over the conventional one and other methods.

Hybrid Whale Optimization Algorithm with simulated annealing for feature selection. •Four hybrid feature selection methods for classification task are proposed.•Our hybrid method combines Whale Optimization Algorithm with simulated annealing.•Eighteen UCI datasets were used in the experiments.•Our approaches result a higher accuracy by using less number of features.

Solving the dynamic weapon target assignment problem by an improved artificial bee colony algorithm with heuristic factor initialization. •Put forward an improved artificial bee colony algorithm based on ranking selection and elite guidance.•Put forward 4 rule-based heuristic factors: Wc, Rc, TRc and TRcL.•The heuristic factors are used in population initialization to improve the quality of the initial solutions in DWTA solving.•The heuristic factor initialization method is combined with the improved ABC algorithm to solve the DWTA problem.

A monarch butterfly optimization-based neural network simulator for prediction of siro-spun yarn tenacity Yarn tenacity directly affects the winding and knitting efficiency as well as warp and weft breakages during weaving process and therefore, is considered as the most important parameter to be controlled during yarn spinning process. Yarn tenacity is dependent on fiber properties and process parameters. Exploring the relationship between fiber properties, process parameters and yarn tenacity is very important to optimize the selection of raw materials and improve yarn quality. In this study, an efficient monarch butterfly optimization-based neural network simulator called MBONN was developed to predict the tenacity of siro-spun yarns from some process parameters and fiber properties. To this end, an experimental dataset was obtained with fiber fineness, yarn twist factor, yarn linear density and strand spacing as the input variables and yarn tenacity as the output parameter. In the proposed MBONN, a monarch butterfly optimization algorithm is applied as a global search method to evolve weights of a multilayer perception (MLP) neural network. The prediction accuracy of the MBONN was compared with that of a MLP neural network trained with back propagation algorithm, MLP neural network trained with genetic algorithms and linear regression model. The results indicated that the prediction accuracy of the proposed MBONN is statistically superior to that of other models. The effect of fiber fineness, yarn linear density, twist factor and strand spacing on yarn tenacity was investigated using the proposed MBONN. Additionally, the observed trends in variation of yarn tenacity with fiber and process parameters were discussed with reference to the yarn internal structure. It was established that higher migration parameters result in increasing the siro-spun yarn tenacity. It was found that the yarns with higher migration parameters benefit from a more coherent self-locking structure which severely restricts fiber slippage, thereby increasing the yarn tenacity.

Cooperation Search Algorithm: A Novel Metaheuristic Evolutionary Intelligence Algorithm For Numerical Optimization And Engineering Optimization Problems This paper develops a novel population-based evolutionary method called cooperation search algorithm (CSA) to address the complex global optimization problem. Inspired by the team cooperation behaviors in modern enterprise, the CSA method randomly generates a set of candidate solutions in the problem space, and then three operators are repeatedly executed until the stopping criterion is met: the team communication operator is used to improve the global exploration and determine the promising search area; the reflective learning operator is used to achieve a comprise between exploration and exploitation; the internal competition operator is used to choose solutions with better performances for the next cycle. Firstly, three kinds of mathematical optimization problems (including 24 famous test functions, 25 CEC2005 test problems and 30 CEC2014 test problems) are used to test the convergence speed and search accuracy of the CSA method. Then, several famous engineering optimization problems (like Gear train design, Welded beam design and Speed reducer design) are chosen to testify the engineering practicality of the CSA method. The results in different scenarios demonstrate that as compared with several existing evolutionary algorithms, the CSA method can effectively explore the decision space and produce competitive results in terms of various performance evaluation indicators. Thus, an effective tool is provided for solving the complex global optimization problems. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A review on the design and optimization of interval type-2 fuzzy controllers A review of the methods used in the design of interval type-2 fuzzy controllers has been considered in this work. The fundamental focus of the work is based on the basic reasons for optimizing type-2 fuzzy controllers for different areas of application. Recently, bio-inspired methods have emerged as powerful optimization algorithms for solving complex problems. In the case of designing type-2 fuzzy controllers for particular applications, the use of bio-inspired optimization methods have helped in the complex task of finding the appropriate parameter values and structure of the fuzzy systems. In this review, we consider the application of genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization and ant colony optimization as three different paradigms that help in the design of optimal type-2 fuzzy controllers. We also mention alternative approaches to designing type-2 fuzzy controllers without optimization techniques. We also provide a comparison of the different optimization methods for the case of designing type-2 fuzzy controllers.

Computational thinking Summary form only given. My vision for the 21st century, Computational Thinking, will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

Non-interactive verifiable computing: outsourcing computation to untrusted workers We introduce and formalize the notion of Verifiable Computation, which enables a computationally weak client to "outsource" the computation of a function F on various dynamically-chosen inputs x1, ...,xk to one or more workers. The workers return the result of the function evaluation, e.g., yi = F(xi), as well as a proof that the computation of F was carried out correctly on the given value xi. The primary constraint is that the verification of the proof should require substantially less computational effort than computing F(i) from scratch. We present a protocol that allows the worker to return a computationally-sound, non-interactive proof that can be verified in O(mċpoly(λ)) time, where m is the bit-length of the output of F, and λ is a security parameter. The protocol requires a one-time pre-processing stage by the client which takes O(|C|ċpoly(λ)) time, where C is the smallest known Boolean circuit computing F. Unlike previous work in this area, our scheme also provides (at no additional cost) input and output privacy for the client, meaning that the workers do not learn any information about the xi or yi values.

Load Scheduling and Dispatch for Aggregators of Plug-In Electric Vehicles This paper proposes an operating framework for aggregators of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). First, a minimum-cost load scheduling algorithm is designed, which determines the purchase of energy in the day-ahead market based on the forecast electricity price and PEV power demands. The same algorithm is applicable for negotiating bilateral contracts. Second, a dynamic dispatch algorithm is developed, used for distributing the purchased energy to PEVs on the operating day. Simulation results are used to evaluate the proposed algorithms, and to demonstrate the potential impact of an aggregated PEV fleet on the power system.

Spatial augmented reality as a method for a mobile robot to communicate intended movement. •Communication strategies are to allow robots to convey upcoming movements to humans.•Arrows for conveying direction of movement are understood by humans.•Simple maps depicting a sequence of upcoming movements are useful to humans.•Robots projecting arrows and a map can effectively communicate upcoming movement.

An ID-Based Linearly Homomorphic Signature Scheme and Its Application in Blockchain. Identity-based cryptosystems mean that public keys can be directly derived from user identifiers, such as telephone numbers, email addresses, and social insurance number, and so on. So they can simplify key management procedures of certificate-based public key infrastructures and can be used to realize authentication in blockchain. Linearly homomorphic signature schemes allow to perform linear computations on authenticated data. And the correctness of the computation can be publicly verified. Although a series of homomorphic signature schemes have been designed recently, there are few homomorphic signature schemes designed in identity-based cryptography. In this paper, we construct a new ID-based linear homomorphic signature scheme, which avoids the shortcomings of the use of public-key certificates. The scheme is proved secure against existential forgery on adaptively chosen message and ID attack under the random oracle model. The ID-based linearly homomorphic signature schemes can be applied in e-business and cloud computing. Finally, we show how to apply it to realize authentication in blockchain.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Reliable Path Planning for Drone Delivery Using a Stochastic Time-Dependent Public Transportation Network Drones have been regarded as a promising means for future delivery industry by many logistics companies. Several drone-based delivery systems have been proposed but they generally have a drawback in delivering customers locating far from warehouses. This paper proposes an alternative system based on a public transportation network. This system has the merit of enlarging the delivery range. As the public transportation network is actually a stochastic time-dependent network, we focus on the reliable drone path planning problem (RDPP). We present a stochastic model to characterize the path traversal time and develop a label setting algorithm to construct the reliable drone path. Furthermore, we consider the limited battery lifetime of the drone to determine whether a path is feasible, and we account this as a constraint in the optimization model. To accommodate the feasibility, the developed label setting algorithm is extended by adding a simple operation. The complexity of the developed algorithm is analyzed and how it works is demonstrated via a case study.

Touring a sequence of polygons Given a sequence of k polygons in the plane, a start point s, and a target point, t, we seek a shortest path that starts at s, visits in order each of the polygons, and ends at t. If the polygons are disjoint and convex, we give an algorithm running in time O(kn log (n/k)), where n is the total number of vertices specifying the polygons. We also extend our results to a case in which the convex polygons are arbitrarily intersecting and the subpath between any two consecutive polygons is constrained to lie within a simply connected region; the algorithm uses O(nk2 log n) time. Our methods are simple and allow shortest path queries from s to a query point t to be answered in time O(k log n + m), where m is the combinatorial path length. We show that for nonconvex polygons this "touring polygons" problem is NP-hard.The touring polygons problem is a strict generalization of some classic problems in computational geometry, including the safari problem, the zoo-keeper problem, and the watchman route problem in a simple polygon. Our new results give an order of magnitude improvement in the running times of the safari problem and the watchman route problem: We solve the safari problem in O(n2 log n) time and the watchman route problem (through a fixed point s) in time O(n3 log n), compared with the previous time bounds of O(n3) and O(n4), respectively.

Numerical Comparison of Some Penalty-Based Constraint Handling Techniques in Genetic Algorithms We study five penalty function-based constraint handling techniques to be used with genetic algorithms in global optimization. Three of them, the method of superiority of feasible points, the method of parameter free penalties and the method of adaptive penalties have already been considered in the literature. In addition, we introduce two new modifications of these methods. We compare all the five methods numerically in 33 test problems and report and analyze the results obtained in terms of accuracy, efficiency and reliability. The method of adaptive penalties turned out to be most efficient while the method of parameter free penalties was the most reliable.

Well-Solvable Special Cases of the Traveling Salesman Problem: A Survey. The traveling salesman problem (TSP) belongs to the most basic, most important, and most investigated problems in combinatorial optimization. Although it is an ${\cal NP}$-hard problem, many of its special cases can be solved efficiently in polynomial time. We survey these special cases with emphasis on the results that have been obtained during the decade 1985--1995. This survey complements an earlier survey from 1985 compiled by Gilmore, Lawler, and Shmoys [The Traveling Salesman Problem---A Guided Tour of Combinatorial Optimization, Wiley, Chichester, pp. 87--143].

Rich Vehicle Routing Problem: Survey The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a well-known research line in the optimization research community. Its different basic variants have been widely explored in the literature. Even though it has been studied for years, the research around it is still very active. The new tendency is mainly focused on applying this study case to real-life problems. Due to this trend, the Rich VRP arises: combining multiple constraints for tackling realistic problems. Nowadays, some studies have considered specific combinations of real-life constraints to define the emerging Rich VRP scopes. This work surveys the state of the art in the field, summarizing problem combinations, constraints defined, and approaches found.

A congested capacitated multi-level fuzzy facility location problem: An efficient drone delivery system •Logistics and economics of an aerial delivery system are investigated.•Fuzzy variables are utilized to capture the uncertainties of the problem.•A congested model is provided to account for the waiting time of the customers.•Multi-level facility location model is used to model different levels of the system.•Case studies are provided to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed model.

Battery-Aware Energy Model of Drone Delivery Tasks Drones are becoming increasingly popular in the commercial market for various package delivery services. In this scenario, the mostly adopted drones are quad-rotors (i.e., quadcopters). The energy consumed by a drone may become an issue, since it may affect (i) the delivery deadline (quality of service), (ii) the number of packages that can be delivered (throughput) and (iii) the battery lifetime (number of recharging cycles). It is thus fundamental try to find the proper compromise between the energy used to complete the delivery and the speed at which the quadcopter flies to reach the destination. In order to achieve this, we have to consider that the energy required by the drone for completing a given delivery task does not exactly correspond to the energy requested to the battery, since the latter is a non-ideal power supply that is able to deliver power with different efficiencies depending on its state of charge. In this paper, we demonstrate that the proposed battery-aware delivery scheduling algorithm carries more packages than the traditional delivery model with the same battery capacity. Moreover, the battery-aware delivery model is 17% more accurate than the traditional delivery model for the same delivery scheme, which prevents the unexpected drone landing.

Fuzzy logic in control systems: fuzzy logic controller. I.

Mobile Edge Computing Enabled 5G Health Monitoring for Internet of Medical Things: A Decentralized Game Theoretic Approach The prompt evolution of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) promotes pervasive in-home health monitoring networks. However, excessive requirements of patients result in insufficient spectrum resources and communication overload. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) enabled 5G health monitoring is conceived as a favorable paradigm to tackle such an obstacle. In this paper, we construct a cost-efficient in-home health monitoring system for IoMT by dividing it into two sub-networks, i.e., intra-Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) and beyond-WBANs. Highlighting the characteristics of IoMT, the cost of patients depends on medical criticality, Age of Information (AoI) and energy consumption. For intra-WBANs, a cooperative game is formulated to allocate the wireless channel resources. While for beyond-WBANs, considering the individual rationality and potential selfishness, a decentralized non-cooperative game is proposed to minimize the system-wide cost in IoMT. We prove that the proposed algorithm can reach a Nash equilibrium. In addition, the upper bound of the algorithm time complexity and the number of patients benefiting from MEC is theoretically derived. Performance evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm with respect to the system-wide cost and the number of patients benefiting from MEC.

Swarm Intelligence: From Natural to Artificial Systems

Navigate like a cabbie: probabilistic reasoning from observed context-aware behavior We present PROCAB, an efficient method for Probabilistically Reasoning from Observed Context-Aware Behavior. It models the context-dependent utilities and underlying reasons that people take different actions. The model generalizes to unseen situations and scales to incorporate rich contextual information. We train our model using the route preferences of 25 taxi drivers demonstrated in over 100,000 miles of collected data, and demonstrate the performance of our model by inferring: (1) decision at next intersection, (2) route to known destination, and (3) destination given partially traveled route.

Stable fuzzy logic control of a general class of chaotic systems This paper proposes a new approach to the stable design of fuzzy logic control systems that deal with a general class of chaotic processes. The stable design is carried out on the basis of a stability analysis theorem, which employs Lyapunov's direct method and the separate stability analysis of each rule in the fuzzy logic controller (FLC). The stability analysis theorem offers sufficient conditions for the stability of a general class of chaotic processes controlled by Takagi---Sugeno---Kang FLCs. The approach suggested in this paper is advantageous because inserting a new rule requires the fulfillment of only one of the conditions of the stability analysis theorem. Two case studies concerning the fuzzy logic control of representative chaotic systems that belong to the general class of chaotic systems are included in order to illustrate our stable design approach. A set of simulation results is given to validate the theoretical results.

OSMnx: New Methods for Acquiring, Constructing, Analyzing, and Visualizing Complex Street Networks. Urban scholars have studied street networks in various ways, but there are data availability and consistency limitations to the current urban planning/street network analysis literature. To address these challenges, this article presents OSMnx, a new tool to make the collection of data and creation and analysis of street networks simple, consistent, automatable and sound from the perspectives of graph theory, transportation, and urban design. OSMnx contributes five significant capabilities for researchers and practitioners: first, the automated downloading of political boundaries and building footprints; second, the tailored and automated downloading and constructing of street network data from OpenStreetMap; third, the algorithmic correction of network topology; fourth, the ability to save street networks to disk as shapefiles, GraphML, or SVG files; and fifth, the ability to analyze street networks, including calculating routes, projecting and visualizing networks, and calculating metric and topological measures. These measures include those common in urban design and transportation studies, as well as advanced measures of the structure and topology of the network. Finally, this article presents a simple case study using OSMnx to construct and analyze street networks in Portland, Oregon.

Convert Harm Into Benefit: A Coordination-Learning Based Dynamic Spectrum Anti-Jamming Approach This paper mainly investigates the multi-user anti-jamming spectrum access problem. Using the idea of “converting harm into benefit,” the malicious jamming signals projected by the enemy are utilized by the users as the coordination signals to guide spectrum coordination. An “internal coordination-external confrontation” multi-user anti-jamming access game model is constructed, and the existence of Nash equilibrium (NE) as well as correlated equilibrium (CE) is demonstrated. A coordination-learning based anti-jamming spectrum access algorithm (CLASA) is designed to achieve the CE of the game. Simulation results show the convergence, and effectiveness of the proposed CLASA algorithm, and indicate that our approach can help users confront the malicious jammer, and coordinate internal spectrum access simultaneously without information exchange. Last but not least, the fairness of the proposed approach under different jamming attack patterns is analyzed, which illustrates that this approach provides fair anti-jamming spectrum access opportunities under complicated jamming pattern.

Fuzzy Adaptive Output Feedback Optimal Control Design for Strict-Feedback Nonlinear Systems. This paper investigates fuzzy adaptive output feedback optimal control problem for a class of strict-feedback nonlinear systems. With the help of fuzzy logic systems approximating the unknown nonlinear functions and cost function, the unmeasured states are estimated by designing fuzzy adaptive state observer. Combining state observer with backstepping design technique, a feedforward controller is designed. Based on the designed feedforward control strategy, the controlled nonlinear system can be converted to an equivalence nonlinear system in affine-form. Finally, a fuzzy adaptive optimal controller with parameters adaptive laws is developed. The whole control scheme consists of a feedforward controller and a feedback optimal controller. It is shown that the proposed output feedback optimal control approach can guarantee that all signals in the closed-loop system are bounded, and the system output can track the reference signal. In addition, the proposed control approach can guarantee cost function is the smallest. Simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control approach.

A vision-based formation control framework We describe a framework for cooperative control of a group of nonholonomic mobile robots that allows us to build complex systems from simple controllers and estimators. The resultant modular approach is attractive because of the potential for reusability. Our approach to composition also guarantees stability and convergence in a wide range of tasks. There are two key features in our approach: 1) a paradigm for switching between simple decentralized controllers that allows for changes in formation; 2) the use of information from a single type of sensor, an omnidirectional camera, for all our controllers. We describe estimators that abstract the sensory information at different levels, enabling both decentralized and centralized cooperative control. Our results include numerical simulations and experiments using a testbed consisting of three nonholonomic robots.

Distributed Control of Spatially Reversible Interconnected Systems with Boundary Conditions We present a class of spatially interconnected systems with boundary conditions that have close links with their spatially invariant extensions. In particular, well-posedness, stability, and performance of the extension imply the same characteristics for the actual, finite extent system. In turn, existing synthesis methods for control of spatially invariant systems can be extended to this class. The relation between the two kinds of systems is proved using ideas based on the "method of images" of partial differential equations theory and uses symmetry properties of the interconnection as a key tool.

Dynamic Learning From Neural Control for Strict-Feedback Systems With Guaranteed Predefined Performance. This paper focuses on dynamic learning from neural control for a class of nonlinear strict-feedback systems with predefined tracking performance attributes. To reduce the number of neural network (NN) approximators used and make the convergence of neural weights verified easily, state variables are introduced to transform the state-feedback control of the original strict-feedback systems into the ...

Global Cooperative Control Framework for Multiagent Systems Subject to Actuator Saturation With Industrial Applications. This paper proposes a global cooperative control framework to address leader-follower consensus of constraints subsystems of industrial plants, in which each subsystem is modeled as an agent and all the subsystems and networks of information flow construct a multiagent system. The focus of this paper is to solve the global leader-follower consensus for multiagent systems with input saturation via low-high gain feedback approach and parametric algebraic Riccati equation approach, in which the feedback gain design is distributed and decoupled from network topologies. By introducing appropriate assumptions, a class of low-high gain feedback protocol is designed based on the states of local neighbors to reach the global stability. It is proved in the sense of Lyapunov that, if the dwell time is larger than a positive threshold, the global leader-follower consensus for the closed-loop linear multiagent systems with input saturation under the derived topology containing a directed spanning tree can be achieved. The results are further extended to leader-follower consensus for nonlinear multiagent systems with the design of nonlinear low-high gain feedback protocol. As industrial applications of the proposed low-high gain scheduling approaches, the controller design of vibration in mechanical systems and satellite formation systems are revisited. Numerical simulations with cooperative control of industries subsystems show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Observer-Based Adaptive Fuzzy Fault-Tolerant Optimal Control for SISO Nonlinear Systems. This paper investigates adaptive fuzzy output feedback fault-tolerant optimal control problem for a class of single-input and single-output nonlinear systems in strict feedback form. The considered nonlinear systems contain unknown nonaffine nonlinear faults and unmeasured states. Fuzzy logic systems are used to approximate cost function and unknown nonlinear functions, respectively. It is assumed...

Adaptive Fuzzy Tracking Control of Nonlinear Time-Delay Systems With Dead-Zone Output Mechanism Based on a Novel Smooth Model This paper presents a novel fuzzy adaptive controller for controlling a class of dead-zone output nonlinear systems with time delays. A new approximate model is first designed to describe a special dead-zone phenomenon encountered by the output mechanism of nonlinear systems, and the proposed smooth model can be conveniently fused with available adaptive fuzzy control techniques. In addition, the coupling effect that the dead zone output and the time-delayed states coexist in a common coupling function makes the tracking control design more complicated. To further address this difficulty, a compensation method fusing mean-value theorem with Lyapunov-Krasovskii function is presented in this paper. By using the proposed output deadzone model, and based on Lyapunov synthesis, a new optimized algorithm is developed to guarantee the prescribed convergence of tracking error, and the boundedness of all the signals in the closed-loop systems. Simulations have been implemented to verify the performance of the proposed fuzzy adaptive controller.

Fault Tolerant Nonrepetitive Trajectory Tracking for MIMO Output Constrained Nonlinear Systems Using Iterative Learning Control. Most works on iterative learning control (ILC) assume identical reference trajectories for the system state over the iteration domain. This fundamental assumption may not always hold in practice, where the desired trajectories or control objectives may be iteration dependent. In this paper, we relax this fundamental assumption, by introducing a new way of modifying the reference trajectories. The ...

Command Filtered Adaptive Backstepping Implementation of adaptive backstepping controllers requires analytic calculation of the partial derivatives of certain stabilizing functions. It is well documented that, as the order of a nonlinear system increases, analytic calculation of these derivatives becomes prohibitive. Therefore, in practice, either alternative control approaches are used or the derivatives are neglected in the implementation. Neglecting the derivatives results in the loss of all guarantees proven by Lyapunov methods for the adaptive backstepping approach and may result in instability. This paper presents a new implementation approach for adaptive backstepping control. The main objectives are to facilitate the derivation and implementation of the adaptive backstepping approach, with performance guarantees proven by Lyapunov methods, for applications that were prohibitively difficult using the standard analytic implementation approach. The new approach uses filtering methods to produce certain command signals and their derivatives which eliminates the requirement of analytic differentiation. The approach also introduces filters to generate certain compensating signals necessary to compute compensated tracking errors suitable for adaptive parameter estimation. We present a set of Lemmas and Theorems to analyze the performance both during the initialization and the operating phases. We show that the initialization phase is of finite duration that can be controlled by selection of a design parameter. We also show that all signals within the system are bounded during this short initialization phase. During the operating phase, we show that the command filtered implementation approach has theoretical properties identical to those of the conventional approach. The general approach is presented and analyzed for systems in generalized parameter strict feedback form. Extensions of the approach are presented to demonstrate the application of the method to a land vehicle trajectory following applicat- on. Application and effectiveness of the proposed method is shown by simulation results.

A Privacy-Preserving and Copy-Deterrence Content-Based Image Retrieval Scheme in Cloud Computing. With the increasing importance of images in people’s daily life, content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has been widely studied. Compared with text documents, images consume much more storage space. Hence, its maintenance is considered to be a typical example for cloud storage outsourcing. For privacy-preserving purposes, sensitive images, such as medical and personal images, need to be encrypted before outsourcing, which makes the CBIR technologies in plaintext domain to be unusable. In this paper, we propose a scheme that supports CBIR over encrypted images without leaking the sensitive information to the cloud server. First, feature vectors are extracted to represent the corresponding images. After that, the pre-filter tables are constructed by locality-sensitive hashing to increase search efficiency. Moreover, the feature vectors are protected by the secure kNN algorithm, and image pixels are encrypted by a standard stream cipher. In addition, considering the case that the authorized query users may illegally copy and distribute the retrieved images to someone unauthorized, we propose a watermark-based protocol to deter such illegal distributions. In our watermark-based protocol, a unique watermark is directly embedded into the encrypted images by the cloud server before images are sent to the query user. Hence, when image copy is found, the unlawful query user who distributed the image can be traced by the watermark extraction. The security analysis and the experiments show the security and efficiency of the proposed scheme.

DEAP: A Database for Emotion Analysis ;Using Physiological Signals We present a multimodal data set for the analysis of human affective states. The electroencephalogram (EEG) and peripheral physiological signals of 32 participants were recorded as each watched 40 one-minute long excerpts of music videos. Participants rated each video in terms of the levels of arousal, valence, like/dislike, dominance, and familiarity. For 22 of the 32 participants, frontal face video was also recorded. A novel method for stimuli selection is proposed using retrieval by affective tags from the last.fm website, video highlight detection, and an online assessment tool. An extensive analysis of the participants' ratings during the experiment is presented. Correlates between the EEG signal frequencies and the participants' ratings are investigated. Methods and results are presented for single-trial classification of arousal, valence, and like/dislike ratings using the modalities of EEG, peripheral physiological signals, and multimedia content analysis. Finally, decision fusion of the classification results from different modalities is performed. The data set is made publicly available and we encourage other researchers to use it for testing their own affective state estimation methods.

Psychophysical Dimensions of Tactile Perception of Textures This paper reviews studies on the tactile dimensionality of physical properties of materials in order to determine a common structure for these dimensions. Based on the commonality found in a number of studies and known mechanisms for the perception of physical properties of textures, we conclude that tactile textures are composed of three prominent psychophysical dimensions that are perceived as roughness/smoothness, hardness/softness, and coldness/warmness. The roughness dimension may be divided into two dimensions: macro and fine roughness. Furthermore, it is reasonable to consider that a friction dimension that is related to the perception of moistness/dryness and stickiness/slipperiness exists. Thus, the five potential dimensions of tactile perception are macro and fine roughness, warmness/coldness, hardness/softness, and friction (moistness/dryness, stickiness/slipperiness). We also summarize methods such as psychological experiments and mathematical approaches for structuring tactile dimensions and their limitations.

An ID-Based Linearly Homomorphic Signature Scheme and Its Application in Blockchain. Identity-based cryptosystems mean that public keys can be directly derived from user identifiers, such as telephone numbers, email addresses, and social insurance number, and so on. So they can simplify key management procedures of certificate-based public key infrastructures and can be used to realize authentication in blockchain. Linearly homomorphic signature schemes allow to perform linear computations on authenticated data. And the correctness of the computation can be publicly verified. Although a series of homomorphic signature schemes have been designed recently, there are few homomorphic signature schemes designed in identity-based cryptography. In this paper, we construct a new ID-based linear homomorphic signature scheme, which avoids the shortcomings of the use of public-key certificates. The scheme is proved secure against existential forgery on adaptively chosen message and ID attack under the random oracle model. The ID-based linearly homomorphic signature schemes can be applied in e-business and cloud computing. Finally, we show how to apply it to realize authentication in blockchain.

Social Robots for (Second) Language Learning in (Migrant) Primary School Children Especially these days, innovation and support from technology to relieve pressure in education is highly urgent. This study tested the potential advantage of a social robot over a tablet in (second) language learning on performance, engagement, and enjoyment. Shortages in primary education call for new technology solutions. Previous studies combined robots with tablets, to compensate for robot’s limitations, however, this study applied direct human–robot interaction. Primary school children (N = 63, aged 4–6) participated in a 3-wave field experiment with story-telling exercises, either with a semi-autonomous robot (without tablet, using WOz) or a tablet. Results showed increased learning gains over time when training with a social robot, compared to the tablet. Children who trained with a robot were more engaged in the story-telling task and enjoyed it more. Robot’s behavioral style (social or neutral) hardly differed overall, however, seems to vary for high versus low educational abilities. While social robots need sophistication before being implemented in schools, our study shows the potential of social robots as tutors in (second) language learning.

Ex Machina: Personal Attacks Seen at Scale. The damage personal attacks cause to online discourse motivates many platforms to try to curb the phenomenon. However, understanding the prevalence and impact of personal attacks in online platforms at scale remains surprisingly difficult. The contribution of this paper is to develop and illustrate a method that combines crowdsourcing and machine learning to analyze personal attacks at scale. We show an evaluation method for a classifier in terms of the aggregated number of crowd-workers it can approximate. We apply our methodology to English Wikipedia, generating a corpus of over 100k high quality human-labeled comments and 63M machine-labeled ones from a classifier that is as good as the aggregate of 3 crowd-workers, as measured by the area under the ROC curve and Spearman correlation. Using this corpus of machine-labeled scores, our methodology allows us to explore some of the open questions about the nature of online personal attacks. This reveals that the majority of personal attacks on Wikipedia are not the result of a few malicious users, nor primarily the consequence of allowing anonymous contributions from unregistered users.

Racial Disparity in Natural Language Processing: A Case Study of Social Media African-American English. We highlight an important frontier in algorithmic fairness: disparity in the quality of natural language processing algorithms when applied to language from authors of different social groups. For example, current systems sometimes analyze the language of females and minorities more poorly than they do of whites and males. We conduct an empirical analysis of racial disparity in language identification for tweets written in African-American English, and discuss implications of disparity in NLP.

On the (im)possibility of fairness. What does it mean for an algorithm to be fair? Different papers use different notions of algorithmic fairness, and although these appear internally consistent, they also seem mutually incompatible. present a mathematical setting in which the distinctions in previous papers can be made formal. In addition to characterizing the spaces of inputs (the observed space) and outputs (the space), we introduce the notion of a construct space: a space that captures unobservable, but meaningful variables for the prediction. We show that in order to prove desirable properties of the entire decision-making process, different mechanisms for fairness require different assumptions about the nature of the mapping from construct space to decision space. The results in this paper imply that future treatments of algorithmic fairness should more explicitly state assumptions about the relationship between constructs and observations.

Data Decisions and Theoretical Implications when Adversarially Learning Fair Representations. How can we learn a classifier that is fair for a protected or sensitive group, when we do not know if the input to the classifier belongs to the protected group? How can we train such a classifier when data on the protected group is difficult to attain? In many settings, finding out the sensitive input attribute can be prohibitively expensive even during model training, and sometimes impossible during model serving. For example, in recommender systems, if we want to predict if a user will click on a given recommendation, we often do not know many attributes of the user, e.g., race or age, and many attributes of the content are hard to determine, e.g., the language or topic. Thus, it is not feasible to use a different classifier calibrated based on knowledge of the sensitive attribute. Here, we use an adversarial training procedure to remove information about the sensitive attribute from the latent representation learned by a neural network. In particular, we study how the choice of data for the adversarial training effects the resulting fairness properties. We find two interesting results: a small amount of data is needed to train these adversarial models, and the data distribution empirically drives the adversaryu0027s notion of fairness.

Equality of Opportunity in Supervised Learning. We propose a criterion for discrimination against a specified sensitive attribute in supervised learning, where the goal is to predict some target based on available features. Assuming data about the predictor, target, and membership in the protected group are available, we show how to optimally adjust any learned predictor so as to remove discrimination according to our definition. Our framework also improves incentives by shifting the cost of poor classification from disadvantaged groups to the decision maker, who can respond by improving the classification accuracy. We enourage readers to consult the more complete manuscript on the arXiv.

Explanation in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Social Sciences. There has been a recent resurgence in the area of explainable artificial intelligence as researchers and practitioners seek to provide more transparency to their algorithms. Much of this research is focused on explicitly explaining decisions or actions to a human observer, and it should not be controversial to say that looking at how humans explain to each other can serve as a useful starting point for explanation in artificial intelligence. However, it is fair to say that most work in explainable artificial intelligence uses only the researchers' intuition of what constitutes a ‘good’ explanation. There exist vast and valuable bodies of research in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science of how people define, generate, select, evaluate, and present explanations, which argues that people employ certain cognitive biases and social expectations to the explanation process. This paper argues that the field of explainable artificial intelligence can build on this existing research, and reviews relevant papers from philosophy, cognitive psychology/science, and social psychology, which study these topics. It draws out some important findings, and discusses ways that these can be infused with work on explainable artificial intelligence.

Neural Machine Translation Of Rare Words With Subword Units Neural machine translation (NMT) models typically operate with a fixed vocabulary, but translation is an open-vocabulary problem. Previous work addresses the translation of out-of-vocabulary words by backing off to a dictionary. In this paper, we introduce a simpler and more effective approach, making the NMT model capable of open-vocabulary translation by encoding rare and unknown words as sequences of subword units. This is based on the intuition that various word classes are translatable via smaller units than words, for instance names (via character copying or transliteration), compounds (via compositional translation), and cognates and loanwords (via phonological and morphological transformations). We discuss the suitability of different word segmentation techniques, including simple character n-gram models and a segmentation based on the byte pair encoding compression algorithm, and empirically show that subword models improve over a back-off dictionary baseline for the WMT 15 translation tasks English-German and English-Russian by up to 1.1 and 1.3 BLEU, respectively.

Online-SVR for short-term traffic flow prediction under typical and atypical traffic conditions Most literature on short-term traffic flow forecasting focused mainly on normal, or non-incident, conditions and, hence, limited their applicability when traffic flow forecasting is most needed, i.e., incident and atypical conditions. Accurate prediction of short-term traffic flow under atypical conditions, such as vehicular crashes, inclement weather, work zone, and holidays, is crucial to effective and proactive traffic management systems in the context of intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and, more specifically, dynamic traffic assignment (DTA). To this end, this paper presents an application of a supervised statistical learning technique called Online Support Vector machine for Regression, or OL-SVR, for the prediction of short-term freeway traffic flow under both typical and atypical conditions. The OL-SVR model is compared with three well-known prediction models including Gaussian maximum likelihood (GML), Holt exponential smoothing, and artificial neural net models. The resultant performance comparisons suggest that GML, which relies heavily on the recurring characteristics of day-to-day traffic, performs slightly better than other models under typical traffic conditions, as demonstrated by previous studies. Yet OL-SVR is the best performer under non-recurring atypical traffic conditions. It appears that for deployed ITS systems that gear toward timely response to real-world atypical and incident situations, OL-SVR may be a better tool than GML.

A powerful and efficient algorithm for numerical function optimization: artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm Swarm intelligence is a research branch that models the population of interacting agents or swarms that are able to self-organize. An ant colony, a flock of birds or an immune system is a typical example of a swarm system. Bees' swarming around their hive is another example of swarm intelligence. Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) Algorithm is an optimization algorithm based on the intelligent behaviour of honey bee swarm. In this work, ABC algorithm is used for optimizing multivariable functions and the results produced by ABC, Genetic Algorithm (GA), Particle Swarm Algorithm (PSO) and Particle Swarm Inspired Evolutionary Algorithm (PS-EA) have been compared. The results showed that ABC outperforms the other algorithms.

Inspecting and Visualizing Distributed Bayesian Student Models Bayesian Belief Networks provide a principled, mathematically sound, and logically rational mechanism to represent student models. The belief net backbone structure proposed by Reye [14,15] offers a practical way to represent and update Bayesian student models describing both cognitive and social aspects of the learner. Considering students as active participants in the modelling process, this paper explores visualization and inspectability issues of Bayesian student modelling. This paper also presents ViSMod an integrated tool to visualize and inspect distributed Bayesian student models.

A novel ray analogy for enrolment of ear biometrics The ear is a maturing biometric with qualities that give it superiority over other biometrics in a number of situations; in particular the ear is relatively immune to variation due to ageing. Successful ear biometrics rely upon a well enrolled dataset, with ears normalised for position, scale and rotation. We present a novel ear enrolment technique using the image ray transform, based upon an analogy to light rays. The transform is capable of highlighting tubular structures such as the helix of the ear and spectacle frames and, by exploiting the elliptical shape of the helix, can be used as the basis of a method for enrolment for ear biometrics. The presented technique achieves 99.6% success at enrolment across 252 images of the XM2VTS database, displaying a resistance to confusion with hair and spectacles. These results show great potential for enhancing many other already existing enrolment methods through use of the image ray transform at a preprocessing stage.

A review on interval type-2 fuzzy logic applications in intelligent control. A review of the applications of interval type-2 fuzzy logic in intelligent control has been considered in this paper. The fundamental focus of the paper is based on the basic reasons for using type-2 fuzzy controllers for different areas of application. Recently, bio-inspired methods have emerged as powerful optimization algorithms for solving complex problems. In the case of designing type-2 fuzzy controllers for particular applications, the use of bio-inspired optimization methods have helped in the complex task of finding the appropriate parameter values and structure of the fuzzy systems. In this review, we consider the application of genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimization and ant colony optimization as three different paradigms that help in the design of optimal type-2 fuzzy controllers. We also mention alternative approaches to designing type-2 fuzzy controllers without optimization techniques.

Automated Detection of Obstructive Sleep Apnea Events from a Single-Lead Electrocardiogram Using a Convolutional Neural Network. In this study, we propose a method for the automated detection of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) from a single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) using a convolutional neural network (CNN). A CNN model was designed with six optimized convolution layers including activation, pooling, and dropout layers. One-dimensional (1D) convolution, rectified linear units (ReLU), and max pooling were applied to the convolution, activation, and pooling layers, respectively. For training and evaluation of the CNN model, a single-lead ECG dataset was collected from 82 subjects with OSA and was divided into training (including data from 63 patients with 34,281 events) and testing (including data from 19 patients with 8571 events) datasets. Using this CNN model, a precision of 0.99%, a recall of 0.99%, and an F-score of 0.99% were attained with the training dataset; these values were all 0.96% when the CNN was applied to the testing dataset. These results show that the proposed CNN model can be used to detect OSA accurately on the basis of a single-lead ECG. Ultimately, this CNN model may be used as a screening tool for those suspected to suffer from OSA.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

An efficient conditionally anonymous ring signature in the random oracle model A conditionally anonymous ring signature is an exception since the anonymity is conditional. Specifically, it allows an entity to confirm/refute the signature that he generated before. A group signature also shares the same property since a group manager can revoke a signer's anonymity using the trapdoor information. However, the special node (i.e., group manager) does not exist in the group in order to satisfy the ad hoc fashion. In this paper, we construct a new conditionally anonymous ring signature, in which the actual signer can be traced without the help of the group manager. The big advantage of the confirmation and disavowal protocols designed by us are non-interactive with constant costs while the known schemes suffer from the linear cost in terms of the ring size n or security parameter s.

Privacy Enabled Digital Rights Management Without Trusted Third Party Assumption Digital rights management systems are required to provide security and accountability without violating the privacy of the entities involved. However, achieving privacy along with accountability in the same framework is hard as these attributes are mutually contradictory. Thus, most of the current digital rights management systems rely on trusted third parties to provide privacy to the entities involved. However, a trusted third party can become malicious and break the privacy protection of the entities in the system. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel privacy preserving content distribution mechanism for digital rights management without relying on the trusted third party assumption. We use simple primitives such as blind decryption and one way hash chain to avoid the trusted third party assumption. We prove that our scheme is not prone to the “oracle problem” of the blind decryption mechanism. The proposed mechanism supports access control without degrading user's privacy as well as allows revocation of even malicious users without violating their privacy.

Cost-Effective Authentic and Anonymous Data Sharing with Forward Security Data sharing has never been easier with the advances of cloud computing, and an accurate analysis on the shared data provides an array of benefits to both the society and individuals. Data sharing with a large number of participants must take into account several issues, including efficiency, data integrity and privacy of data owner. Ring signature is a promising candidate to construct an anonymous and authentic data sharing system. It allows a data owner to anonymously authenticate his data which can be put into the cloud for storage or analysis purpose. Yet the costly certificate verification in the traditional public key infrastructure (PKI) setting becomes a bottleneck for this solution to be scalable. Identity-based (ID-based) ring signature, which eliminates the process of certificate verification, can be used instead. In this paper, we further enhance the security of ID-based ring signature by providing forward security: If a secret key of any user has been compromised, all previous generated signatures that include this user still remain valid. This property is especially important to any large scale data sharing system, as it is impossible to ask all data owners to reauthenticate their data even if a secret key of one single user has been compromised. We provide a concrete and efficient instantiation of our scheme, prove its security and provide an implementation to show its practicality.

Multitier Fog Computing With Large-Scale IoT Data Analytics for Smart Cities. Analysis of Internet of Things (IoT) sensor data is a key for achieving city smartness. In this paper a multitier fog computing model with large-scale data analytics service is proposed for smart cities applications. The multitier fog is consisted of ad-hoc fogs and dedicated fogs with opportunistic and dedicated computing resources, respectively. The proposed new fog computing model with clear fu...

SAFE: Secure Appliance Scheduling for Flexible and Efficient Energy Consumption for Smart Home IoT Smart homes (SHs) aim at forming an energy optimized environment that can efficiently regulate the use of various Internet of Things (IoT) devices in its network. Real-time electricity pricing models along with SHs provide users an opportunity to reduce their electricity expenditure by responding to the pricing that varies with different times of the day, resulting in reducing the expenditure at both customers’ and utility provider’s end. However, responding to such prices and effectively scheduling the appliances under such complex dynamics is a challenging optimization problem to be solved by the provider or by third party services. As communication in SH-IoT environment is extremely sensitive and private, reporting of such usage information to the provider to solve the optimization has a potential risk that the provider or third party services may track users’ energy consumption profile which compromises users’ privacy. To address these issues, we developed a homomorphic encryption-based alternating direction method of multipliers approach to solve the cost-aware appliance scheduling optimization in a distributed manner and schedule home appliances without leaking users’ privacy. Through extensive simulation study considering real-world datasets, we show that the proposed secure appliance scheduling for flexible and efficient energy consumption scheme, namely SAFE, effectively lowers electricity cost while preserving users’ privacy.

A Blockchain-Based Scheme For Privacy-Preserving And Secure Sharing Of Medical Data How to alleviate the contradiction between the patient's privacy and the research or com-mercial demands of health data has become the challenging problem of intelligent medical system with the exponential increase of medical data. In this paper, a blockchainbased privacy-preserving scheme is proposed, which realizes secure sharing of medical data between several entities involved patients, research institutions and semi-trusted cloud servers. And meanwhile, it achieves the data availability and consistency between patients and research institutions, where zero-knowledge proof is employed to verify whether the patient's medical data meets the specific requirements proposed by research institutions without revealing patients' privacy, and then the proxy re-encryption technology is adopted to ensure that research institutions can decrypt the intermediary ciphertext. In addition, this proposal can execute distributed consensus based on PBFT algorithm for transactions between patients and research institutions according to the prearranged terms. Theoretical analysis shows the proposed scheme can satisfy security and privacy requirements such as confidentiality, integrity and availability, as well as performance evaluation demonstrates it is feasible and efficient in contrast with other typical schemes. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Chaos-Based Content Distribution Framework for Digital Rights Management System Multimedia contents are digitally utilized these days. Thus, the development of an effective method to access the content is becoming the topmost priority of the entertainment industry to protect the digital content from unauthorized access. Digital rights management (DRM) systems are the technique that makes digital content accessible only to the legal rights holders. As the Internet of Things environment is used in the distribution and access of digital content, a secure and efficient content delivery mechanism is also required. Keeping the focus on these points, this article proposes a content distribution framework for DRM system using chaotic map. Formal security verification under the random oracle model, which uncovers the proposed protocol's capability to resist the critical attacks is given. Moreover, simulation study for security verification is performed using the broadly accepted “automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications,” which indicates that the protocol is safe. Moreover, the detailed comparative study with related protocols demonstrates that it provides better security and improves the computational and communication efficiency.

Constrained Kalman filtering for indoor localization of transport vehicles using floor-installed HF RFID transponders Localization of transport vehicles is an important issue for many intralogistics applications. The paper presents an inexpensive solution for indoor localization of vehicles. Global localization is realized by detection of RFID transponders, which are integrated in the floor. The paper presents a novel algorithm for fusing RFID readings with odometry using Constraint Kalman filtering. The paper presents experimental results with a Mecanum based omnidirectional vehicle on a NaviFloor® installation, which includes passive HF RFID transponders. The experiments show that the proposed Constraint Kalman filter provides a similar localization accuracy compared to a Particle filter but with much lower computational expense.

Constrained Multiobjective Optimization for IoT-Enabled Computation Offloading in Collaborative Edge and Cloud Computing Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications are becoming more resource-hungry and latency-sensitive, which are severely constrained by limited resources of current mobile hardware. Mobile cloud computing (MCC) can provide abundant computation resources, while mobile-edge computing (MEC) aims to reduce the transmission latency by offloading complex tasks from IoT devices to nearby edge servers. It is sti...

MOEA/D: A Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm Based on Decomposition Decomposition is a basic strategy in traditional multiobjective optimization. However, it has not yet been widely used in multiobjective evolutionary optimization. This paper proposes a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D). It decomposes a multiobjective optimization problem into a number of scalar optimization subproblems and optimizes them simultaneously. Each subproblem is optimized by only using information from its several neighboring subproblems, which makes MOEA/D have lower computational complexity at each generation than MOGLS and nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II). Experimental results have demonstrated that MOEA/D with simple decomposition methods outperforms or performs similarly to MOGLS and NSGA-II on multiobjective 0-1 knapsack problems and continuous multiobjective optimization problems. It has been shown that MOEA/D using objective normalization can deal with disparately-scaled objectives, and MOEA/D with an advanced decomposition method can generate a set of very evenly distributed solutions for 3-objective test instances. The ability of MOEA/D with small population, the scalability and sensitivity of MOEA/D have also been experimentally investigated in this paper.

A Model for Understanding How Virtual Reality Aids Complex Conceptual Learning Designers and evaluators of immersive virtual reality systems have many ideas concerning how virtual reality can facilitate learning. However, we have little information concerning which of virtual reality's features provide the most leverage for enhancing understanding or how to customize those affordances for different learning environments. In part, this reflects the truly complex nature of learning. Features of a learning environment do not act in isolation; other factors such as the concepts or skills to be learned, individual characteristics, the learning experience, and the interaction experience all play a role in shaping the learning process and its outcomes. Through Project Science Space, we have been trying to identify, use, and evaluate immersive virtual reality's affordances as a means to facilitate the mastery of complex, abstract concepts. In doing so, we are beginning to understand the interplay between virtual reality's features and other important factors in shaping the learning process and learning outcomes for this type of material. In this paper, we present a general model that describes how we think these factors work together and discuss some of the lessons we are learning about virtual reality's affordances in the context of this model for complex conceptual learning.

Solving the data sparsity problem in destination prediction Destination prediction is an essential task for many emerging location-based applications such as recommending sightseeing places and targeted advertising according to destinations. A common approach to destination prediction is to derive the probability of a location being the destination based on historical trajectories. However, almost all the existing techniques use various kinds of extra information such as road network, proprietary travel planner, statistics requested from government, and personal driving habits. Such extra information, in most circumstances, is unavailable or very costly to obtain. Thereby we approach the task of destination prediction by using only historical trajectory dataset. However, this approach encounters the \"data sparsity problem\", i.e., the available historical trajectories are far from enough to cover all possible query trajectories, which considerably limits the number of query trajectories that can obtain predicted destinations. We propose a novel method named Sub-Trajectory Synthesis (SubSyn) to address the data sparsity problem. SubSyn first decomposes historical trajectories into sub-trajectories comprising two adjacent locations, and then connects the sub-trajectories into \"synthesised\" trajectories. This process effectively expands the historical trajectory dataset to contain much more trajectories. Experiments based on real datasets show that SubSyn can predict destinations for up to ten times more query trajectories than a baseline prediction algorithm. Furthermore, the running time of the SubSyn-training algorithm is almost negligible for a large set of 1.9 million trajectories, and the SubSyn-prediction algorithm runs over two orders of magnitude faster than the baseline prediction algorithm constantly.

Design of robust fuzzy fault detection filter for polynomial fuzzy systems with new finite frequency specifications This paper investigates the problem of fault detection filter design for discrete-time polynomial fuzzy systems with faults and unknown disturbances. The frequency ranges of the faults and the disturbances are assumed to be known beforehand and to reside in low, middle or high frequency ranges. Thus, the proposed filter is designed in the finite frequency range to overcome the conservatism generated by those designed in the full frequency domain. Being of polynomial fuzzy structure, the proposed filter combines the H−/H∞ performances in order to ensure the best robustness to the disturbance and the best sensitivity to the fault. Design conditions are derived in Sum Of Squares formulations that can be easily solved via available software tools. Two illustrative examples are introduced to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and a comparative study with LMI method is also provided.

Intention-detection strategies for upper limb exosuits: model-based myoelectric vs dynamic-based control The cognitive human-robot interaction between an exosuit and its wearer plays a key role in determining both the biomechanical effects of the device on movements and its perceived effectiveness. There is a lack of evidence, however, on the comparative performance of different control methods, implemented on the same device. Here, we compare two different control approaches on the same robotic suit: a model-based myoelectric control (myoprocessor), which estimates the joint torque from the activation of target muscles, and a dynamic-based control that provides support against gravity using an inverse dynamic model. Tested on a cohort of four healthy participants, assistance from the exosuit results in a marked reduction in the effort of muscles working against gravity with both control approaches (peak reduction of 68.6±18.8%, for the dynamic arm model and 62.4±25.1% for the myoprocessor), when compared to an unpowered condition. Neither of the two controllers had an affect on the performance of their users in a joint-angle tracking task (peak errors of 15.4° and 16.4° for the dynamic arm model and myoprocessor, respectively, compared to 13.1o in the unpowered condition). However, our results highlight the remarkable adaptability of the myoprocessor to seamlessly adapt to changing external dynamics.

A Survey on Mobile Anchor Node Assisted Localization in Wireless Sensor Networks. Localization is one of the key technologies in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), since it provides fundamental support for many location-aware protocols and applications. Constraints on cost and power consumption make it infeasible to equip each sensor node in the network with a Global Position System (GPS) unit, especially for large-scale WSNs. A promising method to localize unknown nodes is to use mobile anchor nodes (MANs), which are equipped with GPS units moving among unknown nodes and periodically broadcasting their current locations to help nearby unknown nodes with localization. A considerable body of research has addressed the Mobile Anchor Node Assisted Localization (MANAL) problem. However to the best of our knowledge, no updated surveys on MAAL reflecting recent advances in the field have been presented in the past few years. This survey presents a review of the most successful MANAL algorithms, focusing on the achievements made in the past decade, and aims to become a starting point for researchers who are initiating their endeavors in MANAL research field. In addition, we seek to present a comprehensive review of the recent breakthroughs in the field, providing links to the most interesting and successful advances in this research field.

Mobility in wireless sensor networks - Survey and proposal. Targeting an increasing number of potential application domains, wireless sensor networks (WSN) have been the subject of intense research, in an attempt to optimize their performance while guaranteeing reliability in highly demanding scenarios. However, hardware constraints have limited their application, and real deployments have demonstrated that WSNs have difficulties in coping with complex communication tasks – such as mobility – in addition to application-related tasks. Mobility support in WSNs is crucial for a very high percentage of application scenarios and, most notably, for the Internet of Things. It is, thus, important to know the existing solutions for mobility in WSNs, identifying their main characteristics and limitations. With this in mind, we firstly present a survey of models for mobility support in WSNs. We then present the Network of Proxies (NoP) assisted mobility proposal, which relieves resource-constrained WSN nodes from the heavy procedures inherent to mobility management. The presented proposal was implemented and evaluated in a real platform, demonstrating not only its advantages over conventional solutions, but also its very good performance in the simultaneous handling of several mobile nodes, leading to high handoff success rate and low handoff time.

Tag-based cooperative data gathering and energy recharging in wide area RFID sensor networks The Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP) conjugates the identification potential of the RFID technology and the sensing and computing capability of the wireless sensors. Practical issues, such as the need of periodically recharging WISPs, challenge the effective deployment of large-scale RFID sensor networks (RSNs) consisting of RFID readers and WISP nodes. In this view, the paper proposes cooperative solutions to energize the WISP devices in a wide-area sensing network while reducing the data collection delay. The main novelty is the fact that both data transmissions and energy transfer are based on the RFID technology only: RFID mobile readers gather data from the WISP devices, wirelessly recharge them, and mutually cooperate to reduce the data delivery delay to the sink. Communication between mobile readers relies on two proposed solutions: a tag-based relay scheme, where RFID tags are exploited to temporarily store sensed data at pre-determined contact points between the readers; and a tag-based data channel scheme, where the WISPs are used as a virtual communication channel for real time data transfer between the readers. Both solutions require: (i) clustering the WISP nodes; (ii) dimensioning the number of required RFID mobile readers; (iii) planning the tour of the readers under the energy and time constraints of the nodes. A simulative analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed solutions when compared to non-cooperative approaches. Differently from classic schemes in the literature, the solutions proposed in this paper better cope with scalability issues, which is of utmost importance for wide area networks.

Improving charging capacity for wireless sensor networks by deploying one mobile vehicle with multiple removable chargers. Wireless energy transfer is a promising technology to prolong the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), by employing charging vehicles to replenish energy to lifetime-critical sensors. Existing studies on sensor charging assumed that one or multiple charging vehicles being deployed. Such an assumption may have its limitation for a real sensor network. On one hand, it usually is insufficient to employ just one vehicle to charge many sensors in a large-scale sensor network due to the limited charging capacity of the vehicle or energy expirations of some sensors prior to the arrival of the charging vehicle. On the other hand, although the employment of multiple vehicles can significantly improve the charging capability, it is too costly in terms of the initial investment and maintenance costs on these vehicles. In this paper, we propose a novel charging model that a charging vehicle can carry multiple low-cost removable chargers and each charger is powered by a portable high-volume battery. When there are energy-critical sensors to be charged, the vehicle can carry the chargers to charge multiple sensors simultaneously, by placing one portable charger in the vicinity of one sensor. Under this novel charging model, we study the scheduling problem of the charging vehicle so that both the dead duration of sensors and the total travel distance of the mobile vehicle per tour are minimized. Since this problem is NP-hard, we instead propose a (3+ϵ)-approximation algorithm if the residual lifetime of each sensor can be ignored; otherwise, we devise a novel heuristic algorithm, where ϵ is a given constant with 0 < ϵ ≤ 1. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms through experimental simulations. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed algorithms are very promising.

Speed control of mobile chargers serving wireless rechargeable networks. Wireless rechargeable networks have attracted increasing research attention in recent years. For charging service, a mobile charger is often employed to move across the network and charge all network nodes. To reduce the charging completion time, most existing works have used the “move-then-charge” model where the charger first moves to specific spots and then starts charging nodes nearby. As a result, these works often aim to reduce the moving delay or charging delay at the spots. However, the charging opportunity on the move is largely overlooked because the charger can charge network nodes while moving, which as we analyze in this paper, has the potential to greatly reduce the charging completion time. The major challenge to exploit the charging opportunity is the setting of the moving speed of the charger. When the charger moves slow, the charging delay will be reduced (more energy will be charged during the movement) but the moving delay will increase. To deal with this challenge, we formulate the problem of delay minimization as a Traveling Salesman Problem with Speed Variations (TSP-SV) which jointly considers both charging and moving delay. We further solve the problem using linear programming to generate (1) the moving path of the charger, (2) the moving speed variations on the path and (3) the stay time at each charging spot. We also discuss possible ways to reduce the calculation complexity. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to study the delay performance under various scenarios. The results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves much less completion time compared to the state-of-the-art work.

A Prediction-Based Charging Policy and Interference Mitigation Approach in the Wireless Powered Internet of Things The Internet of Things (IoT) technology has recently drawn more attention due to its ability to achieve the interconnections of massive physic devices. However, how to provide a reliable power supply to energy-constrained devices and improve the energy efficiency in the wireless powered IoT (WP-IoT) is a twofold challenge. In this paper, we develop a novel wireless power transmission (WPT) system, where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with radio frequency energy transmitter charges the IoT devices. A machine learning framework of echo state networks together with an improved <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${k}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -means clustering algorithm is used to predict the energy consumption and cluster all the sensor nodes at the next period, thus automatically determining the charging strategy. The energy obtained from the UAV by WPT supports the IoT devices to communicate with each other. In order to improve the energy efficiency of the WP-IoT system, the interference mitigation problem is modeled as a mean field game, where an optimal power control policy is presented to adapt and analyze the large number of sensor nodes randomly deployed in WP-IoT. The numerical results verify that our proposed dynamic charging policy effectively reduces the data packet loss rate, and that the optimal power control policy greatly mitigates the interference, and improve the energy efficiency of the whole network.

Design of Self-sustainable Wireless Sensor Networks with Energy Harvesting and Wireless Charging AbstractEnergy provisioning plays a key role in the sustainable operations of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Recent efforts deploy multi-source energy harvesting sensors to utilize ambient energy. Meanwhile, wireless charging is a reliable energy source not affected by spatial-temporal ambient dynamics. This article integrates multiple energy provisioning strategies and adaptive adjustment to accomplish self-sustainability under complex weather conditions. We design and optimize a three-tier framework with the first two tiers focusing on the planning problems of sensors with various types and distributed energy storage powered by environmental energy. Then we schedule the Mobile Chargers (MC) between different charging activities and propose an efficient, 4-factor approximation algorithm. Finally, we adaptively adjust the algorithms to capture real-time energy profiles and jointly optimize those correlated modules. Our extensive simulations demonstrate significant improvement of network lifetime (\(\)), increase of harvested energy (15%), reduction of network cost (30%), and the charging capability of MC by 100%.

Energy-Efficient Mobile Charging for Wireless Power Transfer in Internet of Things Networks. The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to play an important role in the construction of next generation mobile communication services, and is currently used in various services. However, the power-hungry battery significantly limits the lifetime of IoT devices. Among the various lifetime extension techniques, this paper discusses mobile charging, which enables wireless power transfer based on ra...

The Optimal Charging in Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks Recent years have witnessed several new promising technologies to power the wireless sensor networks, which motivate some key topics to be revisited. By integrating sensing and computation capabilities to the traditional RFID tags, the Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform (WISP) is an opensource platform acting as a pioneering experimental platform of wireless rechargeable sensor networks. Different from traditional tags, a RFID-based wireless rechargeable sensor node needs to charge its onboard energy storage above a threshold in order to power its sensing, computation and communication components. Consequently, such charging delay imposes a unique design challenge for deploying wireless rechargeable sensor networks. In this paper, we tackle this problem by planning the optimal movement strategy of the mobile RFID reader, such that the time to charge all nodes in the network above their energy threshold is minimized. We first propose an optimal solution using the linear programming method. To further reduce the computational complexity, we then introduce a heuristic solution with a provable approximation ratio of (1 + )=(1 ") by discretizing the charging power on a two-dimensional space. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that our design outperforms the set-cover-based design by an average of 24:7% while the computational complexity is O((N=")2). Finally, we consider two practical issues in system implementation and provide guidelines for parameter setting.

A comparative study of texture measures with classification based on featured distributions This paper evaluates the performance both of some texture measures which have been successfully used in various applications and of some new promising approaches proposed recently. For classification a method based on Kullback discrimination of sample and prototype distributions is used. The classification results for single features with one-dimensional feature value distributions and for pairs of complementary features with two-dimensional distributions are presented

Distributed finite-time attitude containment control for multiple rigid bodies Distributed finite-time attitude containment control for multiple rigid bodies is addressed in this paper. When there exist multiple stationary leaders, we propose a model-independent control law to guarantee that the attitudes of the followers converge to the stationary convex hull formed by those of the leaders in finite time by using both the one-hop and two-hop neighbors’ information. We also discuss the special case of a single stationary leader and propose a control law using only the one-hop neighbors’ information to guarantee cooperative attitude regulation in finite time. When there exist multiple dynamic leaders, a distributed sliding-mode estimator and a non-singular sliding surface were given to guarantee that the attitudes and angular velocities of the followers converge, respectively, to the dynamic convex hull formed by those of the leaders in finite time. We also explicitly show the finite settling time.

Distributed Channel Selection in Time-Varying Radio Environment: Interference Mitigation Game With Uncoupled Stochastic Learning This paper investigates the problem of distributed channel selection for interference mitigation in a time-varying radio environment without information exchange. Most existing algorithms, which were originally designed for static channels, are costly and inefficient in the presence of time-varying channels. First, we formulate this problem as a noncooperative game, in which the utility of each player is defined as a function of its experienced expected weighted interference. This game is proven to be an exact potential game with the considered network utility (the expected weighted aggregate interference) serving as the potential function. However, most game-theoretic algorithms are not suitable for the considered network, since they are coupled, i.e., the updating procedure is relying on the actions or payoffs of other players. Then, we propose a simple, completely distributed, and uncoupled stochastic learning algorithm, with which the users learn the desirable channel selections from their individual trial-payoff history. It is analytically shown that the proposed algorithm converges to pure strategy Nash equilibrium in time-varying radio environment; moreover, it achieves optimal channel selection profiles and makes the network interference-free for underloaded or equally loaded scenarios, while achieving, on average, near-optimal performance for overloaded scenarios.

Distributed Adaptive Fuzzy Containment Control of Stochastic Pure-Feedback Nonlinear Multiagent Systems With Local Quantized Controller and Tracking Constraint This paper studies the distributed adaptive fuzzy containment tracking control for a class of high-order stochastic pure-feedback nonlinear multiagent systems with multiple dynamic leaders and performance constraint requirement. The control inputs are quantized by hysteresis quantizers. Mean value theorems are used to transfer the nonaffine systems into affine forms and a nonlinear decomposition is employed to solve the quantized input control problem. With a novel structure barrier Lyapunov function, the distributed control strategy is developed. It is strictly proved that the outputs of the followers converge to the convex hull spanned by the multiple dynamic leaders, the containment tracking errors satisfy the performance constraint requirement and the resulting leader-following multiagent system is stable in probability based on Lyapunov stability theory. At last, simulation is provided to show the validity and the advantages of the proposed techniques.

Active Suspension Control of Quarter-Car System With Experimental Validation A reliable, efficient, and simple control is presented and validated for a quarter-car active suspension system equipped with an electro-hydraulic actuator. Unlike the existing techniques, this control does not use any function approximation, e.g., neural networks (NNs) or fuzzy-logic systems (FLSs), while the unmolded dynamics, including the hydraulic actuator behavior, can be accommodated effectively. Hence, the heavy computational costs and tedious parameter tuning phase can be remedied. Moreover, both the transient and steady-state suspension performance can be retained by incorporating prescribed performance functions (PPFs) into the control implementation. This guaranteed performance is particularly useful for guaranteeing the safe operation of suspension systems. Apart from theoretical studies, some practical considerations of control implementation and several parameter tuning guidelines are suggested. Experimental results based on a practical quarter-car active suspension test-rig demonstrate that this control can obtain a superior performance and has better computational efficiency over several other control methods.

Digital blockchain networks appear to be following Metcalfe's Law. •Public ledger systems provide us a wealth of information for their network analysis.•Network effects on the growth of some of the networks was confirmed.•A new network model presented here modeled the networks well as did Metcalfe’s law.•The network’s value was related to the exponential of the root of its active users.•The mathematical form of the model allows for new ways of analyzing the networks.

Decentralized Clearing in Financial Networks AbstractWe consider a situation in which agents have mutual claims on each other, summarized in a liability matrix. Agents' assets might be insufficient to satisfy their liabilities, leading to defaults. In case of default, bankruptcy rules are used to specify the way agents are going to be rationed. A clearing payment matrix is a payment matrix consistent with the prevailing bankruptcy rules that satisfies limited liability and priority of creditors. Since clearing payment matrices and the corresponding values of equity are not uniquely determined, we provide bounds on the possible levels equity can take. Unlike the existing literature, which studies centralized clearing procedures, we introduce a large class of decentralized clearing processes. We show the convergence of any such process in finitely many iterations to the least clearing payment matrix. When the unit of account is sufficiently small, all decentralized clearing processes lead essentially to the same value of equity as a centralized clearing procedure. As a policy implication, it is not necessary to collect and process all the sensitive data of all the agents simultaneously and run a centralized clearing procedure. This paper was accepted by Yinyu Ye, optimization.

A novel GSP auction mechanism for ranking Bitcoin transactions in blockchain mining. Bitcoin is gaining ground in recent years. In the Bitcoin system, miners provide computing power to confirm transactions and mine blocks in pursuit of transaction fees, while users compete by bidding transaction fees for faster confirmation. This process is in essence analogous to online ad auctions, where advertisers bid for more prominent ad slots. Therefore, inspired by the Generalized Second Price (GSP) mechanism dominantly used in online ad auctions, we propose to adopt the GSP auction model in the Bitcoin transaction confirmation game. Also, we use weighted fees as the new ranking basis, which can be calculated by user-submitted fees, transaction size, quality scores and virtual fees accumulated from the waiting time. We show that the formulated static GSP transaction fee auction with complete information has a unique Pure Strategy Nash Equilibrium. Then, we discuss the impacts of quality scores and virtual fees on users' equilibrium fee decisions and payoffs. Finally, computational experiments are designed to validate our theoretical models and analysis. Our research findings indicate that this novel GSP mechanism is superior to the currently adopted GFP mechanism, and can help users save fees. Besides, quality scores and virtual fees are also proven to be effective on reducing users' paid fees. Moreover, the design of virtual fees allows all transactions to be processed more efficiently in a uniform pipeline, and the interests of transactions with and without associated fees are taken into consideration.

Blockchain based efficient and robust fair payment for outsourcing services in cloud computing. •A blockchain based fair payment framework BCPay for cloud services is proposed.•An all-or-nothing checking-proof protocol is introduced in BCPay.•BCPay enjoys soundness and robust fairness without relying on any third-party.•BCPay is very efficient in terms of the number of transactions and computation cost.•We present the applications of BCPay in PDP and outsourcing computation.

Computational thinking Summary form only given. My vision for the 21st century, Computational Thinking, will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

Hamming Embedding and Weak Geometric Consistency for Large Scale Image Search This paper improves recent methods for large scale image search. State-of-the-art methods build on the bag-of-features image representation. We, first, analyze bag-of-features in the framework of approximate nearest neighbor search. This shows the sub-optimality of such a representation for matching descriptors and leads us to derive a more precise representation based on 1) Hamming embedding (HE) and 2) weak geometric consistency constraints (WGC). HE provides binary signatures that refine the matching based on visual words. WGC filters matching descriptors that are not consistent in terms of angle and scale. HE and WGC are integrated within the inverted file and are efficiently exploited for all images, even in the case of very large datasets. Experiments performed on a dataset of one million of images show a significant improvement due to the binary signature and the weak geometric consistency constraints, as well as their efficiency. Estimation of the full geometric transformation, i.e., a re-ranking step on a short list of images, is complementary to our weak geometric consistency constraints and allows to further improve the accuracy.

Wireless Body Area Networks: A Survey Recent developments and technological advancements in wireless communication, MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) technology and integrated circuits has enabled low-power, intelligent, miniaturized, invasive/non-invasive micro and nano-technology sensor nodes strategically placed in or around the human body to be used in various applications, such as personal health monitoring. This exciting new area of research is called Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) and leverages the emerging IEEE 802.15.6 and IEEE 802.15.4j standards, specifically standardized for medical WBANs. The aim of WBANs is to simplify and improve speed, accuracy, and reliability of communication of sensors/actuators within, on, and in the immediate proximity of a human body. The vast scope of challenges associated with WBANs has led to numerous publications. In this paper, we survey the current state-of-art of WBANs based on the latest standards and publications. Open issues and challenges within each area are also explored as a source of inspiration towards future developments in WBANs.

General Inner Approximation Algorithm For Non-Convex Mathematical Programs Inner approximation algorithms have had two major roles in the mathematical programming literature. Their first role was in the construction of algorithms for the decomposition of large-scale mathe...

Protecting privacy using the decentralized label model Stronger protection is needed for the confidentiality and integrity of data, because programs containing untrusted code are the rule rather than the exception. Information flow control allows the enforcement of end-to-end security policies, but has been difficult to put into practice. This article describes the decentralized label model, a new label model for control of information flow in systems with mutual distrust and decentralized authority. The model improves on existing multilevel security models by allowing users to declassify information in a decentralized way, and by improving support for fine-grained data sharing. It supports static program analysis of information flow, so that programs can be certified to permit only acceptable information flows, while largely avoiding the overhead of run-time checking. The article introduces the language Jif, an extension to Java that provides static checking of information flow using the decentralized label model.

Paraphrasing for automatic evaluation This paper studies the impact of paraphrases on the accuracy of automatic evaluation. Given a reference sentence and a machine-generated sentence, we seek to find a paraphrase of the reference sentence that is closer in wording to the machine output than the original reference. We apply our paraphrasing method in the context of machine translation evaluation. Our experiments show that the use of a paraphrased synthetic reference refines the accuracy of automatic evaluation. We also found a strong connection between the quality of automatic paraphrases as judged by humans and their contribution to automatic evaluation.

Large System Analysis of Cooperative Multi-Cell Downlink Transmission via Regularized Channel Inversion with Imperfect CSIT In this paper, we analyze the ergodic sum-rate of a multi-cell downlink system with base station (BS) cooperation using regularized zero-forcing (RZF) precoding. Our model assumes that the channels between BSs and users have independent spatial correlations and imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) is available. Our derivations are based on large dimensional random matrix theory (RMT) under the assumption that the numbers of antennas at the BS and users approach to infinity with some fixed ratios. In particular, a deterministic equivalent expression of the ergodic sum-rate is obtained and is instrumental in getting insight about the joint operations of BSs, which leads to an efficient method to find the asymptotic-optimal regularization parameter for the RZF. In another application, we use the deterministic channel rate to study the optimal feedback bit allocation among the BSs for maximizing the ergodic sum-rate, subject to a total number of feedback bits constraint. By inspecting the properties of the allocation, we further propose a scheme to greatly reduce the search space for optimization. Simulation results demonstrate that the ergodic sum-rates achievable by a subspace search provides comparable results to those by an exhaustive search under various typical settings.

A Model Predictive Control Approach to Microgrid Operation Optimization. Microgrids are subsystems of the distribution grid, which comprises generation capacities, storage devices, and controllable loads, operating as a single controllable system either connected or isolated from the utility grid. In this paper, we present a study on applying a model predictive control approach to the problem of efficiently optimizing microgrid operations while satisfying a time-varying request and operation constraints. The overall problem is formulated using mixed-integer linear programming (MILP), which can be solved in an efficient way by using commercial solvers without resorting to complex heuristics or decompositions techniques. Then, the MILP formulation leads to significant improvements in solution quality and computational burden. A case study of a microgrid is employed to assess the performance of the online optimization-based control strategy and the simulation results are discussed. The method is applied to an experimental microgrid located in Athens, Greece. The experimental results show the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Surrogate-assisted hierarchical particle swarm optimization. Meta-heuristic algorithms, which require a large number of fitness evaluations before locating the global optimum, are often prevented from being applied to computationally expensive real-world problems where one fitness evaluation may take from minutes to hours, or even days. Although many surrogate-assisted meta-heuristic optimization algorithms have been proposed, most of them were developed for solving expensive problems up to 30 dimensions. In this paper, we propose a surrogate-assisted hierarchical particle swarm optimizer for high-dimensional problems consisting of a standard particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm and a social learning particle swarm optimization algorithm (SL-PSO), where the PSO and SL-PSO work together to explore and exploit the search space, and simultaneously enhance the global and local performance of the surrogate model. Our experimental results on seven benchmark functions of dimensions 30, 50 and 100 demonstrate that the proposed method is competitive compared with the state-of-the-art algorithms under a limited computational budget.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Closed-Form Analysis of Non-Linear Age of Information in Status Updates With an Energy Harvesting Transmitter Timely status updates are crucial to enabling applications in the massive Internet of Things (IoT). This paper measures the data-freshness performance of a status update system with an energy-harvesting transmitter, considering the randomness in information generation, transmission, and energy harvesting. The performance is evaluated by a non-linear function of age of information (AoI) that is defined as the time elapsed since the generation of the most up-to-date status information at the receiver. The system is formulated as two queues with status packet generation and energy arrivals both assumed to be Poisson processes. With negligible service time, both first-come-first-served (FCFS) and last-come-first-served (LCFS) disciplines for arbitrary buffer and battery capacities are considered, and a method for calculating the average penalty with non-linear penalty functions is proposed. The average AoI, the average penalty under exponential penalty function, and the AoI’s threshold violation probability are obtained in a closed form. When the service time is assumed to follow exponential distribution, a matrix geometric method is used to obtain the average peak AoI. The results illustrate that under the FCFS discipline, the status update frequency needs to be carefully chosen according to the service rate and energy arrival rate in order to minimize the average penalty.

Mobile Edge Computing Enabled 5G Health Monitoring for Internet of Medical Things: A Decentralized Game Theoretic Approach The prompt evolution of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) promotes pervasive in-home health monitoring networks. However, excessive requirements of patients result in insufficient spectrum resources and communication overload. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) enabled 5G health monitoring is conceived as a favorable paradigm to tackle such an obstacle. In this paper, we construct a cost-efficient in-home health monitoring system for IoMT by dividing it into two sub-networks, i.e., intra-Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs) and beyond-WBANs. Highlighting the characteristics of IoMT, the cost of patients depends on medical criticality, Age of Information (AoI) and energy consumption. For intra-WBANs, a cooperative game is formulated to allocate the wireless channel resources. While for beyond-WBANs, considering the individual rationality and potential selfishness, a decentralized non-cooperative game is proposed to minimize the system-wide cost in IoMT. We prove that the proposed algorithm can reach a Nash equilibrium. In addition, the upper bound of the algorithm time complexity and the number of patients benefiting from MEC is theoretically derived. Performance evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm with respect to the system-wide cost and the number of patients benefiting from MEC.

Fast, Fair, and Efficient Flows in Networks We study the problem of minimizing the maximum latency of flows in networks with congestion. We show that this problem is NP-hard, even when all arc latency functions are linear and there is a single source and sink. Still, an optimal flow and an equilibrium flow share a desirable property in this situation: All flow-carrying paths have the same length, i.e., these solutions are “fair,” which is in general not true for optimal flows in networks with nonlinear latency functions. In addition, the maximum latency of the Nash equilibrium, which can be computed efficiently, is within a constant factor of that of an optimal solution. That is, the so-called price of anarchy is bounded. In contrast, we present a family of instances with multiple sources and a single sink for which the price of anarchy is unbounded, even in networks with linear latencies. Furthermore, we show that an s-t-flow that is optimal with respect to the average latency objective is near-optimal for the maximum latency objective, and it is close to being fair. Conversely, the average latency of a flow minimizing the maximum latency is also within a constant factor of that of a flow minimizing the average latency.

Cancel-and-tighten algorithm for quickest flow problems. Given a directed graph with a capacity and a transit time for each arc and with single source and single sink nodes, the quickest flow problem is to find the minimum time horizon to send a given amount of flow from the source to the sink. This is one of the fundamental dynamic flow problems. Parametric search is one of the basic approaches to solving the problem. Recently, Lin and Jaillet (SODA, 2015) proposed an algorithm whose time complexity is the same as that of the minimum cost flow algorithm. Their algorithm employs a cost scaling technique, and its time complexity is weakly polynomial time. In this article, we modify their algorithm by adopting a technique to construct a strongly polynomial time algorithm for solving the minimum cost flow problem. The proposed algorithm runs in O(nm(2)(log n)(2)) time, where n and m are the numbers of nodes and arcs, respectively. (C) 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Transmit or Discard: Optimizing Data Freshness in Networked Embedded Systems with Energy Harvesting Sources This paper explores how to optimize the freshness of real-time data in energy harvesting based networked embedded systems. We introduce the concept of Age of Information (AoI) to quantitatively measure the data freshness and present a comprehensive analysis on the average AoI of the real-time data with stochastic update arrival and energy replenishment rates. Both an optimal offline solution and an effective online solution are designed to judiciously select a subset of the real-time data updates and determine their corresponding transmission times to optimize the average AoI subject to energy constraints. Our extensive experiments have validated the effectiveness of the proposed solutions, and showed that these two methods can significantly improve the average AoI by 47.2% comparing to the state-of-the-art solutions for low energy replenishment rate.

Age-Minimal Transmission for Energy Harvesting Sensors With Finite Batteries: Online Policies An energy-harvesting sensor node that is sending status updates to a destination is considered. The sensor is equipped with a battery of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">finite</italic> size to save its incoming energy, and consumes one unit of energy per status update transmission, which is delivered to the destination instantly over an error-free channel. The setting is <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">online</italic> in which the harvested energy is revealed to the sensor causally over time after it arrives, and the goal is to design status update transmission times (policy) such that the long term average <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">age of information</italic> (AoI) is minimized. The AoI is defined as the time elapsed since the latest update has reached at the destination. Two energy arrival models are considered: a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">random battery recharge</italic> (RBR) model, and an <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">incremental battery recharge</italic> (IBR) model. In both models, energy arrives according to a Poisson process with unit rate, with values that completely fill up the battery in the RBR model, and with values that fill up the battery incrementally in a unit-by-unit fashion in the IBR model. The key approach to characterizing the optimal status update policy for both models is showing the optimality of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">renewal policies</italic> , in which the inter-update times follow a renewal process in a certain manner that depends on the energy arrival model and the battery size. It is then shown that the optimal renewal policy has an energy-dependent <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">threshold</italic> structure, in which the sensor sends a status update only if the AoI grows above a certain threshold that depends on the energy available in its battery. For both the random and the incremental battery recharge models, the optimal energy-dependent thresholds are characterized <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">explicitly</italic> , i.e., in closed-form, in terms of the optimal long term average AoI. It is also shown that the optimal thresholds are monotonically decreasing in the energy available in the battery, and that the smallest threshold, which comes in effect when the battery is full, is equal to the optimal long term average AoI.

Distinctive Image Features from Scale-Invariant Keypoints This paper presents a method for extracting distinctive invariant features from images that can be used to perform reliable matching between different views of an object or scene. The features are invariant to image scale and rotation, and are shown to provide robust matching across a substantial range of affine distortion, change in 3D viewpoint, addition of noise, and change in illumination. The features are highly distinctive, in the sense that a single feature can be correctly matched with high probability against a large database of features from many images. This paper also describes an approach to using these features for object recognition. The recognition proceeds by matching individual features to a database of features from known objects using a fast nearest-neighbor algorithm, followed by a Hough transform to identify clusters belonging to a single object, and finally performing verification through least-squares solution for consistent pose parameters. This approach to recognition can robustly identify objects among clutter and occlusion while achieving near real-time performance.

ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge. The ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge is a benchmark in object category classification and detection on hundreds of object categories and millions of images. The challenge has been run annually from 2010 to present, attracting participation from more than fifty institutions. This paper describes the creation of this benchmark dataset and the advances in object recognition that have been possible as a result. We discuss the challenges of collecting large-scale ground truth annotation, highlight key breakthroughs in categorical object recognition, provide a detailed analysis of the current state of the field of large-scale image classification and object detection, and compare the state-of-the-art computer vision accuracy with human accuracy. We conclude with lessons learned in the 5 years of the challenge, and propose future directions and improvements.

A Comprehensive Survey on Internet of Things (IoT) Toward 5G Wireless Systems Recently, wireless technologies have been growing actively all around the world. In the context of wireless technology, fifth-generation (5G) technology has become a most challenging and interesting topic in wireless research. This article provides an overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) in 5G wireless systems. IoT in the 5G system will be a game changer in the future generation. It will open a door for new wireless architecture and smart services. Recent cellular network LTE (4G) will not be sufficient and efficient to meet the demands of multiple device connectivity and high data rate, more bandwidth, low-latency quality of service (QoS), and low interference. To address these challenges, we consider 5G as the most promising technology. We provide a detailed overview of challenges and vision of various communication industries in 5G IoT systems. The different layers in 5G IoT systems are discussed in detail. This article provides a comprehensive review on emerging and enabling technologies related to the 5G system that enables IoT. We consider the technology drivers for 5G wireless technology, such as 5G new radio (NR), multiple-input–multiple-output antenna with the beamformation technology, mm-wave commutation technology, heterogeneous networks (HetNets), the role of augmented reality (AR) in IoT, which are discussed in detail. We also provide a review on low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs), security challenges, and its control measure in the 5G IoT scenario. This article introduces the role of AR in the 5G IoT scenario. This article also discusses the research gaps and future directions. The focus is also on application areas of IoT in 5G systems. We, therefore, outline some of the important research directions in 5G IoT.

A communication robot in a shopping mall This paper reports our development of a communication robot for use in a shopping mall to provide shopping information, offer route guidance, and build rapport. In the development, the major difficulties included sensing human behaviors, conversation in a noisy daily environment, and the needs of unexpected miscellaneous knowledge in the conversation. We chose a networkrobot system approach, where a single robot's poor sensing capability and knowledge are supplemented by ubiquitous sensors and a human operator. The developed robot system detects a person with floor sensors to initiate interaction, identifies individuals with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, gives shopping information while chatting, and provides route guidance with deictic gestures. The robotwas partially teleoperated to avoid the difficulty of speech recognition as well as to furnish a new kind of knowledge that only humans can flexibly provide. The information supplied by a human operator was later used to increase the robot's autonomy. For 25 days in a shopping mall, we conducted a field trial and gathered 2642 interactions. A total of 235 participants signed up to use RFID tags and, later, provided questionnaire responses. The questionnaire results are promising in terms of the visitors' perceived acceptability as well as the encouragement of their shopping activities. The results of the teleoperation analysis revealed that the amount of teleoperation gradually decreased, which is also promising.

Minimum acceleration criterion with constraints implies bang-bang control as an underlying principle for optimal trajectories of arm reaching movements. Rapid arm-reaching movements serve as an excellent test bed for any theory about trajectory formation. How are these movements planned? A minimum acceleration criterion has been examined in the past, and the solution obtained, based on the Euler-Poisson equation, failed to predict that the hand would begin and end the movement at rest (i.e., with zero acceleration). Therefore, this criterion was rejected in favor of the minimum jerk, which was proved to be successful in describing many features of human movements. This letter follows an alternative approach and solves the minimum acceleration problem with constraints using Pontryagin's minimum principle. We use the minimum principle to obtain minimum acceleration trajectories and use the jerk as a control signal. In order to find a solution that does not include nonphysiological impulse functions, constraints on the maximum and minimum jerk values are assumed. The analytical solution provides a three-phase piecewise constant jerk signal (bang-bang control) where the magnitude of the jerk and the two switching times depend on the magnitude of the maximum and minimum available jerk values. This result fits the observed trajectories of reaching movements and takes into account both the extrinsic coordinates and the muscle limitations in a single framework. The minimum acceleration with constraints principle is discussed as a unifying approach for many observations about the neural control of movements.

Completely Pinpointing the Missing RFID Tags in a Time-Efficient Way Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has been widely used in inventory management in many scenarios, e.g., warehouses, retail stores, hospitals, etc. This paper investigates a challenging problem of complete identification of missing tags in large-scale RFID systems. Although this problem has attracted extensive attention from academy and industry, the existing work can hardly satisfy the stringent real-time requirements. In this paper, a Slot Filter-based Missing Tag Identification (SFMTI) protocol is proposed to reconcile some expected collision slots into singleton slots and filter out the expected empty slots as well as the unreconcilable collision slots, thereby achieving the improved time-efficiency. The theoretical analysis is conducted to minimize the execution time of the proposed SFMTI. We then propose a cost-effective method to extend SFMTI to the multi-reader scenarios. The extensive simulation experiments and performance results demonstrate that the proposed SFMTI protocol outperforms the most promising Iterative ID-free Protocol (IIP) by reducing nearly 45% of the required execution time, and is just within a factor of 1.18 from the lower bound of the minimum execution time.

A blind medical image watermarking: DWT-SVD based robust and secure approach for telemedicine applications. In this paper, a blind image watermarking scheme based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) is proposed. In this scheme, DWT is applied on ROI (region of interest) of the medical image to get different frequency subbands of its wavelet decomposition. On the low frequency subband LL of the ROI, block-SVD is applied to get different singular matrices. A pair of elements with similar values is identified from the left singular value matrix of these selected blocks. The values of these pairs are modified using certain threshold to embed a bit of watermark content. Appropriate threshold is chosen to achieve the imperceptibility and robustness of medical image and watermark contents respectively. For authentication and identification of original medical image, one watermark image (logo) and other text watermark have been used. The watermark image provides authentication whereas the text data represents electronic patient record (EPR) for identification. At receiving end, blind recovery of both watermark contents is performed by a similar comparison scheme used during the embedding process. The proposed algorithm is applied on various groups of medical images like X-ray, CT scan and mammography. This scheme offers better visibility of watermarked image and recovery of watermark content due to DWT-SVD combination. Moreover, use of Hamming error correcting code (ECC) on EPR text bits reduces the BER and thus provides better recovery of EPR. The performance of proposed algorithm with EPR data coding by Hamming code is compared with the BCH error correcting code and it is found that later one perform better. A result analysis shows that imperceptibility of watermarked image is better as PSNR is above 43 dB and WPSNR is above 52 dB for all set of images. In addition, robustness of the scheme is better than existing scheme for similar set of medical images in terms of normalized correlation coefficient (NCC) and bit-error-rate (BER). An analysis is also carried out to verify the performance of the proposed scheme for different size of watermark contents (image and EPR data). It is observed from analysis that the proposed scheme is also appropriate for watermarking of color image. Using proposed scheme, watermark contents are extracted successfully under various noise attacks like JPEG compression, filtering, Gaussian noise, Salt and pepper noise, cropping, filtering and rotation. Performance comparison of proposed scheme with existing schemes shows proposed scheme has better robustness against different types of attacks. Moreover, the proposed scheme is also robust under set of benchmark attacks known as checkmark attacks.

Hardware Circuits Design and Performance Evaluation of a Soft Lower Limb Exoskeleton Soft lower limb exoskeletons (LLEs) are wearable devices that have good potential in walking rehabilitation and augmentation. While a few studies focused on the structure design and assistance force optimization of the soft LLEs, rarely work has been conducted on the hardware circuits design. The main purpose of this work is to present a new soft LLE for walking efficiency improvement and introduce its hardware circuits design. A soft LLE for hip flexion assistance and a hardware circuits system with scalability were proposed. To assess the efficacy of the soft LLE, the experimental tests that evaluate the sensor data acquisition, force tracking performance, lower limb muscle activity and metabolic cost were conducted. The time error in the peak assistance force was just 1%. The reduction in the normalized root-mean-square EMG of the rectus femoris was 7.1%. The net metabolic cost in exoskeleton on condition was reduced by 7.8% relative to walking with no exoskeleton. The results show that the designed hardware circuits can be applied to the soft LLE and the soft LLE is able to improve walking efficiency of wearers.

A Reliable Routing Protocol for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks. This paper introduces a Reliable Routing Protocol (R2P) for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), which divides the network into overlapping zones. For each zone, a special node is promoted to be the Master Node (MN), which maintains an up-to-date routing boards for inter/intra-zone communication. R2P depends on two types of boards, namely; Internal Routing Board (IRB) and External Routing Board (ERB). Two types of IRB are used, namely; Zone Routing Board (ZRB) that is maintained by MNs, and Private Routing Board (PRB) that is maintained by each network node. Both ZRB and PRB register routes among zone nodes, while ERB, which is maintained by MN, registers available gateways to neighboring zones. R2P employs a special route discovery mechanism to discover available routes to the destination, and then elects the most reliable route. It has been compared against the recent VANET's routing protocols. Experimental results have shown that R2P outperforms the others.

On the History of the Minimum Spanning Tree Problem It is standard practice among authors discussing the minimum spanning tree problem to refer to the work of Kruskal(1956) and Prim (1957) as the sources of the problem and its first efficient solutions, despite the citation by both of Boruvka (1926) as a predecessor. In fact, there are several apparently independent sources and algorithmic solutions of the problem. They have appeared in Czechoslovakia, France, and Poland, going back to the beginning of this century. We shall explore and compare these works and their motivations, and relate them to the most recent advances on the minimum spanning tree problem.

Smart home energy management system using IEEE 802.15.4 and zigbee Wireless personal area network and wireless sensor networks are rapidly gaining popularity, and the IEEE 802.15 Wireless Personal Area Working Group has defined no less than different standards so as to cater to the requirements of different applications. The ubiquitous home network has gained widespread attentions due to its seamless integration into everyday life. This innovative system transparently unifies various home appliances, smart sensors and energy technologies. The smart energy market requires two types of ZigBee networks for device control and energy management. Today, organizations use IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee to effectively deliver solutions for a variety of areas including consumer electronic device control, energy management and efficiency, home and commercial building automation as well as industrial plant management. We present the design of a multi-sensing, heating and airconditioning system and actuation application - the home users: a sensor network-based smart light control system for smart home and energy control production. This paper designs smart home device descriptions and standard practices for demand response and load management "Smart Energy" applications needed in a smart energy based residential or light commercial environment. The control application domains included in this initial version are sensing device control, pricing and demand response and load control applications. This paper introduces smart home interfaces and device definitions to allow interoperability among ZigBee devices produced by various manufacturers of electrical equipment, meters, and smart energy enabling products. We introduced the proposed home energy control systems design that provides intelligent services for users and we demonstrate its implementation using a real testbad.

Bee life-based multi constraints multicast routing optimization for vehicular ad hoc networks. A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a subclass of mobile ad hoc networks, considered as one of the most important approach of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). It allows inter-vehicle communication in which their movement is restricted by a VANET mobility model and supported by some roadside base stations as fixed infrastructures. Multicasting provides different traffic information to a limited number of vehicle drivers by a parallel transmission. However, it represents a very important challenge in the application of vehicular ad hoc networks especially, in the case of the network scalability. In the applications of this sensitive field, it is very essential to transmit correct data anywhere and at any time. Consequently, the VANET routing protocols should be adapted appropriately and meet effectively the quality of service (QoS) requirements in an optimized multicast routing. In this paper, we propose a novel bee colony optimization algorithm called bees life algorithm (BLA) applied to solve the quality of service multicast routing problem (QoS-MRP) for vehicular ad hoc networks as NP-Complete problem with multiple constraints. It is considered as swarm-based algorithm which imitates closely the life of the colony. It follows the two important behaviors in the nature of bees which are the reproduction and the food foraging. BLA is applied to solve QoS-MRP with four objectives which are cost, delay, jitter, and bandwidth. It is also submitted to three constraints which are maximum allowed delay, maximum allowed jitter and minimum requested bandwidth. In order to evaluate the performance and the effectiveness of this realized proposal using C++ and integrated at the routing protocol level, a simulation study has been performed using the network simulator (NS2) based on a mobility model of VANET. The comparisons of the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperformed in an efficient way genetic algorithm (GA), bees algorithm (BA) and marriage in honey bees optimization (MBO) algorithm as state-of-the-art conventional metaheuristics applied to QoS-MRP problem with the same simulation parameters.

On the Spatiotemporal Traffic Variation in Vehicle Mobility Modeling Several studies have shown the importance of realistic micromobility and macromobility modeling in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). At the macroscopic level, most researchers focus on a detailed and accurate description of road topology. However, a key factor often overlooked is a spatiotemporal configuration of vehicular traffic. This factor greatly influences network topology and topology variations. Indeed, vehicle distribution has high spatial and temporal diversity that depends on the time of the day and place attraction. This diversity impacts the quality of radio links and, thus, network topology. In this paper, we propose a new mobility model for vehicular networks in urban and suburban environments. To reproduce realistic network topology and topological changes, the model uses real static and dynamic data on the environment. The data concern particularly the topographic and socioeconomic characteristics of infrastructures and the spatiotemporal population distribution. We validate our model by comparing the simulation results with real data derived from individual displacement survey. We also present statistics on network topology, which show the interest of taking into account the spatiotemporal mobility variation.

Effective crowdsensing and routing algorithms for next generation vehicular networks The vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) has recently emerged as a promising networking technique attracting both the vehicular manufacturing industry and the academic community. Therefore, the design of next generation VANET management schemes becomes an important issue to satisfy the new demands. However, it is difficult to adapt traditional control approaches, which have already proven reliable in ad-hoc wireless networks, directly. In this study, we focus on the development of vehicular crowdsensing and routing algorithms in VANETs. The proposed scheme, which is based on reinforcement learning and game theory, is designed as novel vertical and horizontal game models, and provides an effective dual-plane control mechanism. In a vertical game, network agent and vehicles work together toward an appropriate crowdsensing process. In a horizontal game, vehicles select their best routing route for the VANET routing. Based on the decentralized, distributed manner, our dual-plane game paradigm captures the dynamics of the VANET system. Simulations and performance analysis verify the efficiency of the proposed scheme, showing that our approach can outperform existing schemes in terms of RSU’s task success ratio, normalized routing throughput, and end-to-end packet delay.

An enhanced QoS CBT multicast routing protocol based on Genetic Algorithm in a hybrid HAP-Satellite system A QoS multicast routing scheme based on Genetic Algorithms (GA) heuristic is presented in this paper. Our proposal, called Constrained Cost–Bandwidth–Delay Genetic Algorithm (CCBD-GA), is applied to a multilayer hybrid platform that includes High Altitude Platforms (HAPs) and a Satellite platform. This GA scheme has been compared with another GA well-known in the literature called Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) in order to show the proposed algorithm goodness. In order to test the efficiency of GA schemes on a multicast routing protocol, these GA schemes are inserted into an enhanced version of the Core-Based Tree (CBT) protocol with QoS support. CBT and GA schemes are tested in a multilayer hybrid HAP and Satellite architecture and interesting results have been discovered. The joint bandwidth–delay metrics can be very useful in hybrid platforms such as that considered, because it is possible to take advantage of the single characteristics of the Satellite and HAP segments. The HAP segment offers low propagation delay permitting QoS constraints based on maximum end-to-end delay to be met. The Satellite segment, instead, offers high bandwidth capacity with higher propagation delay. The joint bandwidth–delay metric permits the balancing of the traffic load respecting both QoS constraints. Simulation results have been evaluated in terms of HAP and Satellite utilization, bandwidth, end-to-end delay, fitness function and cost of the GA schemes.

On the ratio of optimal integral and fractional covers It is shown that the ratio of optimal integral and fractional covers of a hypergraph does not exceed 1 + log d , where d is the maximum degree. This theorem may replace probabilistic methods in certain circumstances. Several applications are shown.

Task Offloading in Vehicular Edge Computing Networks: A Load-Balancing Solution Recently, the rapid advance of vehicular networks has led to the emergence of diverse delay-sensitive vehicular applications such as automatic driving, auto navigation. Note that existing resource-constrained vehicles cannot adequately meet these demands on low / ultra-low latency. By offloading parts of the vehicles’ compute-intensive tasks to the edge servers in proximity, mobile edge computing is envisioned as a promising paradigm, giving rise to the vehicular edge computing networks (VECNs). However, most existing works on task offloading in VECNs did not take the load balancing of the computation resources at the edge servers into account. To address these issues and given the high dynamics of vehicular networks, we introduce fiber-wireless (FiWi) technology to enhance VECNs, due to its advantages on centralized network management and supporting multiple communication techniques. Aiming to minimize the processing delay of the vehicles’ computation tasks, we propose a software-defined networking (SDN) based load-balancing task offloading scheme in FiWi enhanced VECNs, where SDN is introduced to provide supports for the centralized network and vehicle information management. Extensive analysis and numerical results corroborate that our proposed load-balancing scheme can achieve superior performance on processing delay reduction by utilizing the edge servers’ computation resources more efficiently.

A hierarchical type-2 fuzzy logic control architecture for autonomous mobile robots Autonomous mobile robots navigating in changing and dynamic unstructured environments like the outdoor environments need to cope with large amounts of uncertainties that are inherent of natural environments. The traditional type-1 fuzzy logic controller (FLC) using precise type-1 fuzzy sets cannot fully handle such uncertainties. A type-2 FLC using type-2 fuzzy sets can handle such uncertainties to produce a better performance. In this paper, we present a novel reactive control architecture for autonomous mobile robots that is based on type-2 FLC to implement the basic navigation behaviors and the coordination between these behaviors to produce a type-2 hierarchical FLC. In our experiments, we implemented this type-2 architecture in different types of mobile robots navigating in indoor and outdoor unstructured and challenging environments. The type-2-based control system dealt with the uncertainties facing mobile robots in unstructured environments and resulted in a very good performance that outperformed the type-1-based control system while achieving a significant rule reduction compared to the type-1 system.

Multi-stage genetic programming: A new strategy to nonlinear system modeling This paper presents a new multi-stage genetic programming (MSGP) strategy for modeling nonlinear systems. The proposed strategy is based on incorporating the individual effect of predictor variables and the interactions among them to provide more accurate simulations. According to the MSGP strategy, an efficient formulation for a problem comprises different terms. In the first stage of the MSGP-based analysis, the output variable is formulated in terms of an influencing variable. Thereafter, the error between the actual and the predicted value is formulated in terms of a new variable. Finally, the interaction term is derived by formulating the difference between the actual values and the values predicted by the individually developed terms. The capabilities of MSGP are illustrated by applying it to the formulation of different complex engineering problems. The problems analyzed herein include the following: (i) simulation of pH neutralization process, (ii) prediction of surface roughness in end milling, and (iii) classification of soil liquefaction conditions. The validity of the proposed strategy is confirmed by applying the derived models to the parts of the experimental results that were not included in the analyses. Further, the external validation of the models is verified using several statistical criteria recommended by other researchers. The MSGP-based solutions are capable of effectively simulating the nonlinear behavior of the investigated systems. The results of MSGP are found to be more accurate than those of standard GP and artificial neural network-based models.

Placing Virtual Machines to Optimize Cloud Gaming Experience Optimizing cloud gaming experience is no easy task due to the complex tradeoff between gamer quality of experience (QoE) and provider net profit. We tackle the challenge and study an optimization problem to maximize the cloud gaming provider's total profit while achieving just-good-enough QoE. We conduct measurement studies to derive the QoE and performance models. We formulate and optimally solve the problem. The optimization problem has exponential running time, and we develop an efficient heuristic algorithm. We also present an alternative formulation and algorithms for closed cloud gaming services with dedicated infrastructures, where the profit is not a concern and overall gaming QoE needs to be maximized. We present a prototype system and testbed using off-the-shelf virtualization software, to demonstrate the practicality and efficiency of our algorithms. Our experience on realizing the testbed sheds some lights on how cloud gaming providers may build up their own profitable services. Last, we conduct extensive trace-driven simulations to evaluate our proposed algorithms. The simulation results show that the proposed heuristic algorithms: (i) produce close-to-optimal solutions, (ii) scale to large cloud gaming services with 20,000 servers and 40,000 gamers, and (iii) outperform the state-of-the-art placement heuristic, e.g., by up to 3.5 times in terms of net profits.

Adversarial Example Generation with Syntactically Controlled Paraphrase Networks. We propose syntactically controlled paraphrase networks (SCPNs) and use them to generate adversarial examples. Given a sentence and a target syntactic form (e.g., a constituency parse), SCPNs are trained to produce a paraphrase of the sentence with the desired syntax. We show it is possible to create training data for this task by first doing backtranslation at a very large scale, and then using a parser to label the syntactic transformations that naturally occur during this process. Such data allows us to train a neural encoder-decoder model with extra inputs to specify the target syntax. A combination of automated and human evaluations show that SCPNs generate paraphrases that follow their target specifications without decreasing paraphrase quality when compared to baseline (uncontrolled) paraphrase systems. Furthermore, they are more capable of generating syntactically adversarial examples that both (1) fool pretrained models and (2) improve the robustness of these models to syntactic variation when used to augment their training data.

Hardware Circuits Design and Performance Evaluation of a Soft Lower Limb Exoskeleton Soft lower limb exoskeletons (LLEs) are wearable devices that have good potential in walking rehabilitation and augmentation. While a few studies focused on the structure design and assistance force optimization of the soft LLEs, rarely work has been conducted on the hardware circuits design. The main purpose of this work is to present a new soft LLE for walking efficiency improvement and introduce its hardware circuits design. A soft LLE for hip flexion assistance and a hardware circuits system with scalability were proposed. To assess the efficacy of the soft LLE, the experimental tests that evaluate the sensor data acquisition, force tracking performance, lower limb muscle activity and metabolic cost were conducted. The time error in the peak assistance force was just 1%. The reduction in the normalized root-mean-square EMG of the rectus femoris was 7.1%. The net metabolic cost in exoskeleton on condition was reduced by 7.8% relative to walking with no exoskeleton. The results show that the designed hardware circuits can be applied to the soft LLE and the soft LLE is able to improve walking efficiency of wearers.

Rate-Splitting Assisted Massive Machine-Type Communications in Cell-Free Massive MIMO This letter focuses on integrating rate-splitting multiple-access (RSMA) with time-division-duplex Cell-free Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) for massive machine-type communications. Due to the large number of devices, their sporadic access behaviour and limited coherence interval, we assume a random access strategy with all active devices utilizing the same pilot for uplink channel estimation. This gives rise to a highly pilot-contaminated scenario, which inevitably deteriorates channel estimates. Motivated by the robustness of RSMA towards imperfect channel state information, we propose a novel RSMA-assisted downlink transmission framework for cell-free massive MIMO. On the basis of the downlink achievable spectral efficiency of the common and private streams, we devise a heuristic common precoder design and propose a novel max-min power control method for the proposed RSMA-assisted scheme. Numerical results show that RSMA effectively mitigates the effect of pilot contamination in the downlink and achieves a significant performance gain over a conventional cell-free massive MIMO network.

The Sybil Attack Large-scale peer-to-peer systems facesecurity threats from faulty or hostile remotecomputing elements. To resist these threats, manysuch systems employ redundancy. However, if asingle faulty entity can present multiple identities,it can control a substantial fraction of the system,thereby undermining this redundancy. Oneapproach to preventing these &quot;Sybil attacks&quot; is tohave a trusted agency certify identities. Thispaper shows that, without a logically centralizedauthority, Sybil...

BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation Human evaluations of machine translation are extensive but expensive. Human evaluations can take months to finish and involve human labor that can not be reused. We propose a method of automatic machine translation evaluation that is quick, inexpensive, and language-independent, that correlates highly with human evaluation, and that has little marginal cost per run. We present this method as an automated understudy to skilled human judges which substitutes for them when there is need for quick or frequent evaluations.

Computational thinking Summary form only given. My vision for the 21st century, Computational Thinking, will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

Fuzzy logic in control systems: fuzzy logic controller. I.

Switching between stabilizing controllers This paper deals with the problem of switching between several linear time-invariant (LTI) controllers—all of them capable of stabilizing a speci4c LTI process—in such a way that the stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed for any switching sequence. We show that it is possible to 4nd realizations for any given family of controller transfer matrices so that the closed-loop system remains stable, no matter how we switch among the controller. The motivation for this problem is the control of complex systems where con8icting requirements make a single LTI controller unsuitable. ? 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

Tabu Search - Part I

Bidirectional recurrent neural networks In the first part of this paper, a regular recurrent neural network (RNN) is extended to a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN). The BRNN can be trained without the limitation of using input information just up to a preset future frame. This is accomplished by training it simultaneously in positive and negative time direction. Structure and training procedure of the proposed network are explained. In regression and classification experiments on artificial data, the proposed structure gives better results than other approaches. For real data, classification experiments for phonemes from the TIMIT database show the same tendency. In the second part of this paper, it is shown how the proposed bidirectional structure can be easily modified to allow efficient estimation of the conditional posterior probability of complete symbol sequences without making any explicit assumption about the shape of the distribution. For this part, experiments on real data are reported

An intensive survey of fair non-repudiation protocols With the phenomenal growth of the Internet and open networks in general, security services, such as non-repudiation, become crucial to many applications. Non-repudiation services must ensure that when Alice sends some information to Bob over a network, neither Alice nor Bob can deny having participated in a part or the whole of this communication. Therefore a fair non-repudiation protocol has to generate non-repudiation of origin evidences intended to Bob, and non-repudiation of receipt evidences destined to Alice. In this paper, we clearly define the properties a fair non-repudiation protocol must respect, and give a survey of the most important non-repudiation protocols without and with trusted third party (TTP). For the later ones we discuss the evolution of the TTP's involvement and, between others, describe the most recent protocol using a transparent TTP. We also discuss some ad-hoc problems related to the management of non-repudiation evidences.

Dynamic movement and positioning of embodied agents in multiparty conversations For embodied agents to engage in realistic multiparty conversation, they must stand in appropriate places with respect to other agents and the environment. When these factors change, such as an agent joining the conversation, the agents must dynamically move to a new location and/or orientation to accommodate. This paper presents an algorithm for simulating movement of agents based on observed human behavior using techniques developed for pedestrian movement in crowd simulations. We extend a previous group conversation simulation to include an agent motion algorithm. We examine several test cases and show how the simulation generates results that mirror real-life conversation settings.

An improved genetic algorithm with conditional genetic operators and its application to set-covering problem The genetic algorithm (GA) is a popular, biologically inspired optimization method. However, in the GA there is no rule of thumb to design the GA operators and select GA parameters. Instead, trial-and-error has to be applied. In this paper we present an improved genetic algorithm in which crossover and mutation are performed conditionally instead of probability. Because there are no crossover rate and mutation rate to be selected, the proposed improved GA can be more easily applied to a problem than the conventional genetic algorithms. The proposed improved genetic algorithm is applied to solve the set-covering problem. Experimental studies show that the improved GA produces better results over the conventional one and other methods.

Lane-level traffic estimations using microscopic traffic variables This paper proposes a novel inference method to estimate lane-level traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time on road segments where local information could not be measured and assessed directly. The main contributions of the proposed method are 1) the ability to perform lane-level estimations of traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time and 2) the ability to adapt to different traffic regimes by assessing only microscopic traffic variables. We propose a modified Kriging estimation model which explicitly takes into account both spatial and temporal variability. Performance evaluations are conducted using real-world data under different traffic regimes and it is shown that the proposed method outperforms a Kalman filter-based approach.

Convolutional Neural Network-Based Classification of Driver's Emotion during Aggressive and Smooth Driving Using Multi-Modal Camera Sensors. Because aggressive driving often causes large-scale loss of life and property, techniques for advance detection of adverse driver emotional states have become important for the prevention of aggressive driving behaviors. Previous studies have primarily focused on systems for detecting aggressive driver emotion via smart-phone accelerometers and gyro-sensors, or they focused on methods of detecting physiological signals using electroencephalography (EEG) or electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors. Because EEG and ECG sensors cause discomfort to drivers and can be detached from the driver's body, it becomes difficult to focus on bio-signals to determine their emotional state. Gyro-sensors and accelerometers depend on the performance of GPS receivers and cannot be used in areas where GPS signals are blocked. Moreover, if driving on a mountain road with many quick turns, a driver's emotional state can easily be misrecognized as that of an aggressive driver. To resolve these problems, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method of detecting emotion to identify aggressive driving using input images of the driver's face, obtained using near-infrared (NIR) light and thermal camera sensors. In this research, we conducted an experiment using our own database, which provides a high classification accuracy for detecting driver emotion leading to either aggressive or smooth (i.e., relaxed) driving. Our proposed method demonstrates better performance than existing methods.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Collision-free consensus in multi-agent networks: A monotone systems perspective This paper addresses the collision-free consensus problem in a network of agents with single-integrator dynamics. Distributed algorithms with local interactions are proposed to achieve consensus while guaranteeing collision-free among agents during the evolution of the multi-agent networks. The novelty of the proposed algorithms lies in the definition of neighbors for each agent, which is different from the usual sense that neighbors are selected by the distance between agents in the state space. In the proposed strategies, the neighbor set for each agent is determined by the distance or difference between agents in the index space after ordering and labeling all agents according to certain ordering rules including weighted order and lexicographic order. The consensus analysis of the proposed algorithms is presented with some existing results on algebraic graph theory and matrix analysis. Meanwhile, by realizing the relations between order preservation and collision-free, a systematic analysis framework on order preservation and hence collision-free for agents in arbitrary dimension is provided based on tools from monotone systems theory. Illustrated numerical examples are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategies.

Constrained Interaction and Coordination in Proximity-Limited Multiagent Systems In this paper, we consider the problem of controlling the interactions of a group of mobile agents, subject to a set of topological constraints. Assuming proximity-limited interagent communication, we leverage mobility, unlike prior work, to enable adjacent agents to interact discriminatively, i.e., to actively retain or reject communication links on the basis of constraint satisfaction. Specifically, we propose a distributed scheme that consists of hybrid controllers with discrete switching for link discrimination, coupled with attractive and repulsive potentials fields for mobility control, where constraint violation predicates form the basis for discernment. We analyze the application of constrained interaction to two canonical coordination objectives, i.e., aggregation and dispersion, with maximum and minimum node degree constraints, respectively. For each task, we propose predicates and control potentials, and examine the dynamical properties of the resulting hybrid systems. Simulation results demonstrate the correctness of our proposed methods and the ability of our framework to generate topology-aware coordinated behavior.

Collective behavior of mobile agents with state-dependent interactions. In this paper, we develop a novel self-propelled particle model to describe the emergent behavior of a group of mobile agents. Each agent coordinates with its neighbors through a local force accounting for velocity alignment and collision avoidance. The interactions between agents are governed by path loss influence and state-dependent rules, which results in topology changes as well as discontinuities in the local forces. By using differential inclusion technique and algebraic graph theory, we show that collective behavior emerges while collisions between agents can be avoided, if the interaction topology is jointly connected. A trade-off between the path loss influence and connectivity condition to guarantee the collective behavior is discovered and discussed. Numerical simulations are given to validate the theoretical results.

Prescribed-Time Consensus and Containment Control of Networked Multiagent Systems. In this paper, we present a new prescribed-time distributed control method for consensus and containment of networked multiple systems. Different from both regular finite-time control (where the finite settling time is not uniform in initial conditions) and the fixed-time control (where the settling time cannot be preassigned arbitrarily), the proposed one is built upon a novel scaling function, resulting in prespecifiable convergence time (the settling time can be preassigned as needed within any physically allowable range). Furthermore, the developed control scheme not only ensures that all the agents reach the average consensus in prescribed finite time under undirected connected topology, but also ensures that all the agents reach a prescribed-time consensus with the root's state being the group decision value under the directed topology containing a spanning tree with the root as the leader. In addition, we extend the result to prescribed-time containment control involving multiple leaders under directed communication topology. Numerical examples are provided to verify the effectiveness and the superiority of the proposed control.

Distributed Resilient Finite-Time Secondary Control for Heterogeneous Battery Energy Storage Systems Under Denial-of-Service Attacks This article addresses the problem of distributed resilient finite-time control of multiple heterogeneous battery energy storage systems (BESSs) in a microgrid subject to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Note that DoS attacks may block information transmission among BESSs by preventing the BESS from sending data, compromising the devices and jamming a communication network. A distributed secure control framework is presented, where an acknowledgment (ACK)-based attack detection strategy and a communication recovery mechanism are introduced to mitigate the impact of DoS attacks by repairing the paralyzed topology graphs caused by DoS attacks back into the initial connected graph. Under this framework, a distributed resilient finite-time secondary control scheme is proposed such that frequency regulation, active power sharing, and energy level balancing of BESSs can be achieved simultaneously in a finite time; meanwhile, operational constraints can be satisfied at any control transient time. Moreover, based on theoretical analysis, the impact of the duration time of DoS attacks on the convergence time of the control algorithm can be explicitly revealed. Finally, validity and effectiveness of the proposed control scheme are demonstrated by case studies on a modified IEEE 57-bus testing system.

Distributed Asymptotic Consensus in Directed Networks of Nonaffine Systems With Nonvanishing Disturbance In this paper the distributed asymptotic consensus problem is addressed for a group of high-order nonaffine agents with uncertain dynamics, nonvanishing disturbances and unknown control directions under directed networks. A class of auxiliary variables are first introduced which forms second-order filters and induces all measurable signals of agents&#39; states. In view of this property, a distributed...

Distributed finite-time attitude containment control for multiple rigid bodies Distributed finite-time attitude containment control for multiple rigid bodies is addressed in this paper. When there exist multiple stationary leaders, we propose a model-independent control law to guarantee that the attitudes of the followers converge to the stationary convex hull formed by those of the leaders in finite time by using both the one-hop and two-hop neighbors’ information. We also discuss the special case of a single stationary leader and propose a control law using only the one-hop neighbors’ information to guarantee cooperative attitude regulation in finite time. When there exist multiple dynamic leaders, a distributed sliding-mode estimator and a non-singular sliding surface were given to guarantee that the attitudes and angular velocities of the followers converge, respectively, to the dynamic convex hull formed by those of the leaders in finite time. We also explicitly show the finite settling time.

Wireless sensor network survey A wireless sensor network (WSN) has important applications such as remote environmental monitoring and target tracking. This has been enabled by the availability, particularly in recent years, of sensors that are smaller, cheaper, and intelligent. These sensors are equipped with wireless interfaces with which they can communicate with one another to form a network. The design of a WSN depends significantly on the application, and it must consider factors such as the environment, the application's design objectives, cost, hardware, and system constraints. The goal of our survey is to present a comprehensive review of the recent literature since the publication of [I.F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam, E. Cayirci, A survey on sensor networks, IEEE Communications Magazine, 2002]. Following a top-down approach, we give an overview of several new applications and then review the literature on various aspects of WSNs. We classify the problems into three different categories: (1) internal platform and underlying operating system, (2) communication protocol stack, and (3) network services, provisioning, and deployment. We review the major development in these three categories and outline new challenges.

Mobile Edge Computing: A Survey. Mobile edge computing (MEC) is an emergent architecture where cloud computing services are extended to the edge of networks leveraging mobile base stations. As a promising edge technology, it can be applied to mobile, wireless, and wireline scenarios, using software and hardware platforms, located at the network edge in the vicinity of end-users. MEC provides seamless integration of multiple appli...

Automated Flower Classification over a Large Number of Classes We investigate to what extent combinations of features can improve classification performance on a large dataset of similar classes. To this end we introduce a 103 class flower dataset. We compute four different features for the flowers, each describing different aspects, namely the local shape/texture, the shape of the boundary, the overall spatial distribution of petals, and the colour. We combine the features using a multiple kernel framework with a SVM classifier. The weights for each class are learnt using the method of Varma and Ray [16], which has achieved state of the art performance on other large dataset, such as Caltech 101/256. Our dataset has a similar challenge in the number of classes, but with the added difficulty of large between class similarity and small within class similarity. Results show that learning the optimum kernel combination of multiple features vastly improves the performance, from 55.1% for the best single feature to 72.8% for the combination of all features.

Dynamic transfer among alternative controllers and its relation to antiwindup controller design Advanced control strategies and modern consulting provide new challenges for the classical problem of bumpless transfer. It can, for example, be necessary to transfer between an only approximately known existing analog controller and a new digital or adaptive controller without accessing any states. Transfer ought to be bidirectional and not presuppose steady state, so that an immediate back-transfer is possible if the new controller should drive the plant unstable. We present a scheme that meets these requirements. By casting the problem of bidirectional transfer into an associated tracking control problem, systematic analysis and design procedures from control theory can be applied. The associated control problem also has a correspondence to the design of antiwindup controllers. The paper includes laboratory and industrial applications.

Understanding Taxi Service Strategies From Taxi GPS Traces Taxi service strategies, as the crowd intelligence of massive taxi drivers, are hidden in their historical time-stamped GPS traces. Mining GPS traces to understand the service strategies of skilled taxi drivers can benefit the drivers themselves, passengers, and city planners in a number of ways. This paper intends to uncover the efficient and inefficient taxi service strategies based on a large-scale GPS historical database of approximately 7600 taxis over one year in a city in China. First, we separate the GPS traces of individual taxi drivers and link them with the revenue generated. Second, we investigate the taxi service strategies from three perspectives, namely, passenger-searching strategies, passenger-delivery strategies, and service-region preference. Finally, we represent the taxi service strategies with a feature matrix and evaluate the correlation between service strategies and revenue, informing which strategies are efficient or inefficient. We predict the revenue of taxi drivers based on their strategies and achieve a prediction residual as less as 2.35 RMB/h,1 which demonstrates that the extracted taxi service strategies with our proposed approach well characterize the driving behavior and performance of taxi drivers.

Finite-Time Adaptive Fuzzy Tracking Control Design for Nonlinear Systems. This paper addresses the finite-time tracking problem of nonlinear pure-feedback systems. Unlike the literature on traditional finite-time stabilization, in this paper the nonlinear system functions, including the bounding functions, are all totally unknown. Fuzzy logic systems are used to model those unknown functions. To present a finite-time control strategy, a criterion of semiglobal practical...

Learning Feature Recovery Transformer for Occluded Person Re-Identification One major issue that challenges person re-identification (Re-ID) is the ubiquitous occlusion over the captured persons. There are two main challenges for the occluded person Re-ID problem, i.e., the interference of noise during feature matching and the loss of pedestrian information brought by the occlusions. In this paper, we propose a new approach called Feature Recovery Transformer (FRT) to address the two challenges simultaneously, which mainly consists of visibility graph matching and feature recovery transformer. To reduce the interference of the noise during feature matching, we mainly focus on visible regions that appear in both images and develop a visibility graph to calculate the similarity. In terms of the second challenge, based on the developed graph similarity, for each query image, we propose a recovery transformer that exploits the feature sets of its k-nearest neighbors in the gallery to recover the complete features. Extensive experiments across different person Re-ID datasets, including occluded, partial and holistic datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of FRT. Specifically, FRT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art results by at least 6.2% Rank- 1 accuracy and 7.2% mAP scores on the challenging Occluded-Duke dataset.

VerifCar: a framework for modeling and model checking communicating autonomous vehicles. This paper presents a framework, called VerifCar, devoted to the validation of decision policies of communicating autonomous vehicles (CAVs). The approach focuses on the formal modeling of CAVs by means of timed automata, allowing a formal and exhaustive analysis of the behaviors of vehicles. VerifCar supports a parametric modeling of CAV systems as a network of timed automata tailored for verification and limiting the well-known state space explosion. As an illustration, VerifCar is applied to check robustness and efficiency, as well as to asses the impact of communication delays on the decision algorithms of CAVs, on well chosen case studies representing real-life critical situations.

Using Ontology-Based Traffic Models for More Efficient Decision Making of Autonomous Vehicles The paper describes how a high-level abstract world model can be used to support the decision-making process of an autonomous driving system. The approach uses a hierarchical world model and distinguishes between a low-level model for the trajectory planning and a high-level model for solving the traffic coordination problem. The abstract world model used in the CyberCars-2 project is presented. It is based on a topological lane segmentation and introduces relations to represent the semantic context of the traffic scenario. This makes it much easier to realize a consistent and complete driving control system, and to analyze, evaluate and simulate such a system.

Ontology-based methods for enhancing autonomous vehicle path planning We report the results of a first implementation demonstrating the use of an ontology to support reasoning about obstacles to improve the capabilities and performance of on-board route planning for autonomous vehicles. This is part of an overall effort to evaluate the performance of ontologies in different components of an autonomous vehicle within the 4D/RCS system architecture developed at NIST. Our initial focus has been on simple roadway driving scenarios where the controlled vehicle encounters potential obstacles in its path. As reported elsewhere [C. Schlenoff, S. Balakirsky, M. Uschold, R. Provine, S. Smith, Using ontologies to aid navigation planning in autonomous vehicles, Knowledge Engineering Review 18 (3) (2004) 243–255], our approach is to develop an ontology of objects in the environment, in conjunction with rules for estimating the damage that would be incurred by collisions with different objects in different situations. Automated reasoning is used to estimate collision damage; this information is fed to the route planner to help it decide whether to plan to avoid the object. We describe the results of the first implementation that integrates the ontology, the reasoner and the planner. We describe our insights and lessons learned and discuss resulting changes to our approach.

Online Verification of Automated Road Vehicles Using Reachability Analysis An approach for formally verifying the safety of automated vehicles is proposed. Due to the uniqueness of each traffic situation, we verify safety online, i.e., during the operation of the vehicle. The verification is performed by predicting the set of all possible occupancies of the automated vehicle and other traffic participants on the road. In order to capture all possible future scenarios, we apply reachability analysis to consider all possible behaviors of mathematical models considering uncertain inputs (e.g., sensor noise, disturbances) and partially unknown initial states. Safety is guaranteed with respect to the modeled uncertainties and behaviors if the occupancy of the automated vehicle does not intersect that of other traffic participants for all times. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated by test drives with an automated vehicle at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

AVFI: Fault Injection for Autonomous Vehicles Autonomous vehicle (AV) technology is rapidly becoming a reality on U.S. roads, offering the promise of improvements in traffic management, safety, and the comfort and efficiency of vehicular travel. With this increasing popularity and ubiquitous deployment, resilience has become a critical requirement for public acceptance and adoption. Recent studies into the resilience of AVs have shown that though the AV systems are improving over time, they have not reached human levels of automation. Prior work in this area has studied the safety and resilience of individual components of the AV system (e.g., testing of neural networks powering the perception function). However, methods for holistic end-to-end resilience assessment of AV systems are still non-existent.

Specifying Safety of Autonomous Vehicles in Signal Temporal Logic We develop a set of contracts for autonomous control software that ensures that if all traffic participants follow the contracts, the overall traffic system will be collision-free. We express our contracts in Signal Temporal Logic (STL), a lightweight specification language that enables V &V methodologies. We demonstrate how the specification can be used for evaluation of the performance of autonomy software, and We provide preliminary evidence that our contracts are not excessively conservative, i.e., they are not more restrictive than existing guidelines for safe driving by humans.

An Interaction-aware Evaluation Method for Highly Automated Vehicles It is important to build a rigorous verification and validation (V&amp;V) process to evaluate the safety of highly automated vehicles (HAVs) before their wide deployment on public roads. In this paper, we propose an interaction-aware framework for HAV safety evaluation which is suitable for some highly-interactive driving scenarios including highway merging, roundabout entering, etc. Contrary to e...

Accelerated Evaluation of Automated Vehicles Safety in Lane-Change Scenarios Based on Importance Sampling Techniques Automated vehicles (AVs) must be thoroughly evaluated before their release and deployment. A widely used evaluation approach is the Naturalistic-Field Operational Test (N-FOT), which tests prototype vehicles directly on the public roads. Due to the low exposure to safety-critical scenarios, N-FOTs are time consuming and expensive to conduct. In this paper, we propose an accelerated evaluation approach for AVs. The results can be used to generate motions of the other primary vehicles to accelerate the verification of AVs in simulations and controlled experiments. Frontal collision due to unsafe cut-ins is the target crash type of this paper. Human-controlled vehicles making unsafe lane changes are modeled as the primary disturbance to AVs based on data collected by the University of Michigan Safety Pilot Model Deployment Program. The cut-in scenarios are generated based on skewed statistics of collected human driver behaviors, which generate risky testing scenarios while preserving the statistical information so that the safety benefits of AVs in nonaccelerated cases can be accurately estimated. The cross-entropy method is used to recursively search for the optimal skewing parameters. The frequencies of the occurrences of conflicts, crashes, and injuries are estimated for a modeled AV, and the achieved accelerated rate is around 2000 to 20 000. In other words, in the accelerated simulations, driving for 1000 miles will expose the AV with challenging scenarios that will take about 2 to 20 million miles of real-world driving to encounter. This technique thus has the potential to greatly reduce the development and validation time for AVs.

A survey of socially interactive robots This paper reviews “socially interactive robots”: robots for which social human–robot interaction is important. We begin by discussing the context for socially interactive robots, emphasizing the relationship to other research fields and the different forms of “social robots”. We then present a taxonomy of design methods and system components used to build socially interactive robots. Finally, we describe the impact of these robots on humans and discuss open issues. An expanded version of this paper, which contains a survey and taxonomy of current applications, is available as a technical report [T. Fong, I. Nourbakhsh, K. Dautenhahn, A survey of socially interactive robots: concepts, design and applications, Technical Report No. CMU-RI-TR-02-29, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2002].

A General Equilibrium Model for Industries with Price and Service Competition This paper develops a stochastic general equilibrium inventory model for an oligopoly, in which all inventory constraint parameters are endogenously determined. We propose several systems of demand processes whose distributions are functions of all retailers' prices and all retailers' service levels. We proceed with the investigation of the equilibrium behavior of infinite-horizon models for industries facing this type of generalized competition, under demand uncertainty.We systematically consider the following three competition scenarios. (1) Price competition only: Here, we assume that the firms' service levels are exogenously chosen, but characterize how the price and inventory strategy equilibrium vary with the chosen service levels. (2) Simultaneous price and service-level competition: Here, each of the firms simultaneously chooses a service level and a combined price and inventory strategy. (3) Two-stage competition: The firms make their competitive choices sequentially. In a first stage, all firms simultaneously choose a service level; in a second stage, the firms simultaneously choose a combined pricing and inventory strategy with full knowledge of the service levels selected by all competitors. We show that in all of the above settings a Nash equilibrium of infinite-horizon stationary strategies exists and that it is of a simple structure, provided a Nash equilibrium exists in a so-called reduced game.We pay particular attention to the question of whether a firm can choose its service level on the basis of its own (input) characteristics (i.e., its cost parameters and demand function) only. We also investigate under which of the demand models a firm, under simultaneous competition, responds to a change in the exogenously specified characteristics of the various competitors by either: (i) adjusting its service level and price in the same direction, thereby compensating for price increases (decreases) by offering improved (inferior) service, or (ii) adjusting them in opposite directions, thereby simultaneously offering better or worse prices and service.

Load Scheduling and Dispatch for Aggregators of Plug-In Electric Vehicles This paper proposes an operating framework for aggregators of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). First, a minimum-cost load scheduling algorithm is designed, which determines the purchase of energy in the day-ahead market based on the forecast electricity price and PEV power demands. The same algorithm is applicable for negotiating bilateral contracts. Second, a dynamic dispatch algorithm is developed, used for distributing the purchased energy to PEVs on the operating day. Simulation results are used to evaluate the proposed algorithms, and to demonstrate the potential impact of an aggregated PEV fleet on the power system.

An Efficient Non-Negative Matrix-Factorization-Based Approach to Collaborative Filtering for Recommender Systems Matrix-factorization (MF)-based approaches prove to be highly accurate and scalable in addressing collaborative filtering (CF) problems. During the MF process, the non-negativity, which ensures good representativeness of the learnt model, is critically important. However, current non-negative MF (NMF) models are mostly designed for problems in computer vision, while CF problems differ from them due to their extreme sparsity of the target rating-matrix. Currently available NMF-based CF models are based on matrix manipulation and lack practicability for industrial use. In this work, we focus on developing an NMF-based CF model with a single-element-based approach. The idea is to investigate the non-negative update process depending on each involved feature rather than on the whole feature matrices. With the non-negative single-element-based update rules, we subsequently integrate the Tikhonov regularizing terms, and propose the regularized single-element-based NMF (RSNMF) model. RSNMF is especially suitable for solving CF problems subject to the constraint of non-negativity. The experiments on large industrial datasets show high accuracy and low-computational complexity achieved by RSNMF.

Driver Gaze Zone Estimation Using Convolutional Neural Networks: A General Framework and Ablative Analysis Driver gaze has been shown to be an excellent surrogate for driver attention in intelligent vehicles. With the recent surge of highly autonomous vehicles, driver gaze can be useful for determining the handoff time to a human driver. While there has been significant improvement in personalized driver gaze zone estimation systems, a generalized system which is invariant to different subjects, perspe...

Dual-objective mixed integer linear program and memetic algorithm for an industrial group scheduling problem Group scheduling problems have attracted much attention owing to their many practical applications. This work proposes a new bi-objective serial-batch group scheduling problem considering the constraints of sequence-dependent setup time, release time, and due time. It is originated from an important industrial process, i.e., wire rod and bar rolling process in steel production systems. Two objecti...

Distributed multirobot localization In this paper, we present a new approach to the problem of simultaneously localizing a group of mobile robots capable of sensing one another. Each of the robots collects sensor data regarding its own motion and shares this information with the rest of the team during the update cycles. A single estimator, in the form of a Kalman filter, processes the available positioning information from all the members of the team and produces a pose estimate for every one of them. The equations for this centralized estimator can be written in a decentralized form, therefore allowing this single Kalman filter to be decomposed into a number of smaller communicating filters. Each of these filters processes the sensor data collected by its host robot. Exchange of information between the individual filters is necessary only when two robots detect each other and measure their relative pose. The resulting decentralized estimation schema, which we call collective localization, constitutes a unique means for fusing measurements collected from a variety of sensors with minimal communication and processing requirements. The distributed localization algorithm is applied to a group of three robots and the improvement in localization accuracy is presented. Finally, a comparison to the equivalent decentralized information filter is provided.

Performance analysis of multirobot Cooperative localization This paper studies the accuracy of position estimation for groups of mobile robots performing cooperative localization. We consider the case of teams comprised of possibly heterogeneous robots and provide analytical expressions for the upper bound on their expected positioning uncertainty. This bound is determined as a function of the sensors' noise covariance and the eigenvalues of the relative position measurement graph (RPMG), i.e., the weighted directed graph which represents the network of robot-to-robot exteroceptive measurements. The RPMG is employed as a key element in this analysis, and its properties are related to the localization performance of the team. It is shown that, for a robot group of a certain size, the maximum expected rate of uncertainty increase is independent of the accuracy and number of relative position measurements and depends only on the accuracy of the proprioceptive and orientation sensors on the robots. Additionally, the effects of changes in the topology of the RPMG are studied, and it is shown that, at steady-state, these reconfigurations do not inflict any loss in localization precision. Experimental data, as well as simulation results that validate the theoretical analysis, are presented

Self-triggered coordination of robotic networks for optimal deployment This paper studies a deployment problem for a group of robots where individual agents operate with outdated information about each other's locations. Our objective is to understand to what extent outdated information is still useful and at which point it becomes essential to obtain new, up-to-date information. We propose a self-triggered coordination algorithm based on spatial partitioning techniques with uncertain information. We analyze its correctness in synchronous and asynchronous scenarios, and establish the same convergence guarantees that a synchronous algorithm with perfect information at all times would achieve. The technical approach combines computational geometry, set-valued stability analysis, and event-based systems.

Multi-Sensor Scheduling for State Estimation with Event-Based, Stochastic Triggers. In networked systems, state estimation is hampered by communication limits. Past approaches, which consider scheduling sensors through deterministic event-triggers, reduce communication and maintain estimation quality. However, these approaches destroy the Gaussian property of the state, making it computationally intractable to obtain an exact minimum mean squared error estimate. We propose a stochastic event-triggered sensor schedule for state estimation which preserves the Gaussianity of the system, extending previous results from the single-sensor to the multi-sensor case.

Analysis of cooperative localisation performance under varying sensor qualities and communication rates. Cooperative Localisation (CL) is a robust technique used to improve localisation accuracy in multi-robot systems. However, there is a lack of research on how CL performs under different conditions. It is unclear when CL is worthwhile, and how CL performance is affected if the system changes. This information is particularly important for systems with robots that have limited power and processing, which cannot afford to constantly perform CL. This paper investigates CL under varying sensor qualities (position accuracy, yaw accuracy, sample rate), communication rates, and number of robots for both homogeneous and heterogeneous multi-robot systems. Trends are found in MATLAB simulations using the UTIAS dataset, and then validated on Kobuki robots using an OptiTrack-based system. We find that yaw accuracy has a substantial effect on performance, a communication rate that is too fast can be detrimental, and heterogeneous systems are greater candidates for cooperative localisation than homogeneous systems.

Communication in reactive multiagent robotic systems Multiple cooperating robots are able to complete many tasks more quickly and reliably than one robot alone. Communication between the robots can multiply their capabilities and effectiveness, but to what extent? In this research, the importance of communication in robotic societies is investigated through experiments on both simulated and real robots. Performance was measured for three different types of communication for three different tasks. The levels of communication are progressively more complex and potentially more expensive to implement. For some tasks, communication can significantly improve performance, but for others inter-agent communication is apparently unnecessary. In cases where communication helps, the lowest level of communication is almost as effective as the more complex type. The bulk of these results are derived from thousands of simulations run with randomly generated initial conditions. The simulation results help determine appropriate parameters for the reactive control system which was ported for tests on Denning mobile robots.

Consensus problems in networks of agents with switching topology and time-delays. In this paper, we discuss consensus problems for a network of dynamic agents with flxed and switching topologies. We analyze three cases: i) networks with switching topology and no time-delays, ii) networks with flxed topology and communication time-delays, and iii) max-consensus problems (or leader determination) for groups of discrete-time agents. In each case, we introduce a linear/nonlinear consensus protocol and provide convergence analysis for the proposed distributed algorithm. Moreover, we establish a connection between the Fiedler eigenvalue of the information ∞ow in a network (i.e. algebraic connectivity of the network) and the negotiation speed (or performance) of the corresponding agreement protocol. It turns out that balanced digraphs play an important role in addressing average-consensus problems. We intro- duce disagreement functions that play the role of Lyapunov functions in convergence analysis of consensus protocols. A distinctive feature of this work is to address consen- sus problems for networks with directed information ∞ow. We provide analytical tools that rely on algebraic graph theory, matrix theory, and control theory. Simulations are provided that demonstrate the efiectiveness of our theoretical results.

A Tutorial On Visual Servo Control This article provides a tutorial introduction to visual servo control of robotic manipulators, Since the topic spans many disciplines our goal is limited to providing a basic conceptual framework, We begin by reviewing the prerequisite topics from robotics and computer vision, including a brief review of coordinate transformations, velocity representation, and a description of the geometric aspects of the image formation process, We then present a taxonomy of visual servo control systems, The two major classes of systems, position-based and image-based systems, are then discussed in detail, Since any visual servo system must be capable of tracking image features in a sequence of images, we also include an overview of feature-based and correlation-based methods for tracking, We conclude the tutorial with a number of observations on the current directions of the research field of visual servo control.

Reliable Computation Offloading for Edge-Computing-Enabled Software-Defined IoV Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has drawn great interest recent years. Various IoV applications have emerged for improving the safety, efficiency, and comfort on the road. Cloud computing constitutes a popular technique for supporting delay-tolerant entertainment applications. However, for advanced latency-sensitive applications (e.g., auto/assisted driving and emergency failure management), cloud computing may result in excessive delay. Edge computing, which extends computing and storage capabilities to the edge of the network, emerges as an attractive technology. Therefore, to support these computationally intensive and latency-sensitive applications in IoVs, in this article, we integrate mobile-edge computing nodes (i.e., mobile vehicles) and fixed edge computing nodes (i.e., fixed road infrastructures) to provide low-latency computing services cooperatively. For better exploiting these heterogeneous edge computing resources, the concept of software-defined networking (SDN) and edge-computing-aided IoV (EC-SDIoV) is conceived. Moreover, in a complex and dynamic IoV environment, the outage of both processing nodes and communication links becomes inevitable, which may have life-threatening consequences. In order to ensure the completion with high reliability of latency-sensitive IoV services, we introduce both partial computation offloading and reliable task allocation with the reprocessing mechanism to EC-SDIoV. Since the optimization problem is nonconvex and NP-hard, a heuristic algorithm, fault-tolerant particle swarm optimization algorithm is designed for maximizing the reliability (FPSO-MR) with latency constraints. Performance evaluation results validate that the proposed scheme is indeed capable of reducing the latency as well as improving the reliability of the EC-SDIoV.

Symbolic model checking for real-time systems We describe finite-state programs over real-numbered time in a guarded-command language with real-valued clocks or, equivalently, as finite automata with real-valued clocks. Model checking answers the question which states of a real-time program satisfy a branching-time specification (given in an extension of CTL with clock variables). We develop an algorithm that computes this set of states symbolically as a fixpoint of a functional on state predicates, without constructing the state space. For this purpose, we introduce a μ-calculus on computation trees over real-numbered time. Unfortunately, many standard program properties, such as response for all nonzeno execution sequences (during which time diverges), cannot be characterized by fixpoints: we show that the expressiveness of the timed μ-calculus is incomparable to the expressiveness of timed CTL. Fortunately, this result does not impair the symbolic verification of "implementable" real-time programs-those whose safety constraints are machine-closed with respect to diverging time and whose fairness constraints are restricted to finite upper bounds on clock values. All timed CTL properties of such programs are shown to be computable as finitely approximable fixpoints in a simple decidable theory.

Minimum acceleration criterion with constraints implies bang-bang control as an underlying principle for optimal trajectories of arm reaching movements. Rapid arm-reaching movements serve as an excellent test bed for any theory about trajectory formation. How are these movements planned? A minimum acceleration criterion has been examined in the past, and the solution obtained, based on the Euler-Poisson equation, failed to predict that the hand would begin and end the movement at rest (i.e., with zero acceleration). Therefore, this criterion was rejected in favor of the minimum jerk, which was proved to be successful in describing many features of human movements. This letter follows an alternative approach and solves the minimum acceleration problem with constraints using Pontryagin's minimum principle. We use the minimum principle to obtain minimum acceleration trajectories and use the jerk as a control signal. In order to find a solution that does not include nonphysiological impulse functions, constraints on the maximum and minimum jerk values are assumed. The analytical solution provides a three-phase piecewise constant jerk signal (bang-bang control) where the magnitude of the jerk and the two switching times depend on the magnitude of the maximum and minimum available jerk values. This result fits the observed trajectories of reaching movements and takes into account both the extrinsic coordinates and the muscle limitations in a single framework. The minimum acceleration with constraints principle is discussed as a unifying approach for many observations about the neural control of movements.

Reinforcement Q-learning for optimal tracking control of linear discrete-time systems with unknown dynamics. In this paper, a novel approach based on the Q-learning algorithm is proposed to solve the infinite-horizon linear quadratic tracker (LQT) for unknown discrete-time systems in a causal manner. It is assumed that the reference trajectory is generated by a linear command generator system. An augmented system composed of the original system and the command generator is constructed and it is shown that the value function for the LQT is quadratic in terms of the state of the augmented system. Using the quadratic structure of the value function, a Bellman equation and an augmented algebraic Riccati equation (ARE) for solving the LQT are derived. In contrast to the standard solution of the LQT, which requires the solution of an ARE and a noncausal difference equation simultaneously, in the proposed method the optimal control input is obtained by only solving an augmented ARE. A Q-learning algorithm is developed to solve online the augmented ARE without any knowledge about the system dynamics or the command generator. Convergence to the optimal solution is shown. A simulation example is used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.

Robust Sparse Linear Discriminant Analysis Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a very popular supervised feature extraction method and has been extended to different variants. However, classical LDA has the following problems: 1) The obtained discriminant projection does not have good interpretability for features. 2) LDA is sensitive to noise. 3) LDA is sensitive to the selection of number of projection directions. In this paper, a novel feature extraction method called robust sparse linear discriminant analysis (RSLDA) is proposed to solve the above problems. Specifically, RSLDA adaptively selects the most discriminative features for discriminant analysis by introducing the l2;1 norm. An orthogonal matrix and a sparse matrix are also simultaneously introduced to guarantee that the extracted features can hold the main energy of the original data and enhance the robustness to noise, and thus RSLDA has the potential to perform better than other discriminant methods. Extensive experiments on six databases demonstrate that the proposed method achieves the competitive performance compared with other state-of-the-art feature extraction methods. Moreover, the proposed method is robust to the noisy data. IEEE

Ethical Considerations Of Applying Robots In Kindergarten Settings: Towards An Approach From A Macroperspective In child-robot interaction (cHRI) research, many studies pursue the goal to develop interactive systems that can be applied in everyday settings. For early education, increasingly, the setting of a kindergarten is targeted. However, when cHRI and research are brought into a kindergarten, a range of ethical and related procedural aspects have to be considered and dealt with. While ethical models elaborated within other human-robot interaction settings, e.g., assisted living contexts, can provide some important indicators for relevant issues, we argue that it is important to start developing a systematic approach to identify and tackle those ethical issues which rise with cHRI in kindergarten settings on a more global level and address the impact of the technology from a macroperspective beyond the effects on the individual. Based on our experience in conducting studies with children in general and pedagogical considerations on the role of the institution of kindergarten in specific, in this paper, we enfold some relevant aspects that have barely been addressed in an explicit way in current cHRI research. Four areas are analyzed and key ethical issues are identified in each area: (1) the institutional setting of a kindergarten, (2) children as a vulnerable group, (3) the caregivers' role, and (4) pedagogical concepts. With our considerations, we aim at (i) broadening the methodology of the current studies within the area of cHRI, (ii) revalidate it based on our comprehensive empirical experience with research in kindergarten settings, both laboratory and real-world contexts, and (iii) provide a framework for the development of a more systematic approach to address the ethical issues in cHRI research within kindergarten settings.

Unifying Analytical Methods With Numerical Methods for Traffic System Modeling and Control. Shockwaves lead to speed variation and capacity drop, which hamper the stationarity and throughput of traffic network greatly in reality. In order to dominate or suppress shockwaves, there exist two philosophies: the analytical and numerical methods to investigate various traffic management schemes. However, both are studied completely separately in the existing literature. In this paper, we prima...

Generative Adversarial Networks for Parallel Transportation Systems. Generative Adversaria Networks (GANs) have emerged as a promising and effective mechanism for machine learning due to its recent successful applications. GANs share the same idea of producing, testing, acquiring, and utilizing data as well as knowledge based on artificial systems, computational experiments, and parallel execution of actual and virtual scenarios, as outlined in the theory of parall...

Deep Multi-Modal Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving: Datasets, Methods, and Challenges AbstractRecent advancements in perception for autonomous driving are driven by deep learning. In order to achieve robust and accurate scene understanding, autonomous vehicles are usually equipped with different sensors (e.g. cameras, LiDARs, Radars), and multiple sensing modalities can be fused to exploit their complementary properties. In this context, many methods have been proposed for deep multi-modal perception problems. However, there is no general guideline for network architecture design, and questions of “what to fuse”, “when to fuse”, and “how to fuse” remain open. This review paper attempts to systematically summarize methodologies and discuss challenges for deep multi-modal object detection and semantic segmentation in autonomous driving. To this end, we first provide an overview of on-board sensors on test vehicles, open datasets, and background information for object detection and semantic segmentation in autonomous driving research. We then summarize the fusion methodologies and discuss challenges and open questions. In the appendix, we provide tables that summarize topics and methods. We also provide an interactive online platform to navigate each reference: https://boschresearch.github.io/multimodalperception/.

Enhanced Object Detection With Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Advanced Driving Assistance Object detection is a critical problem for advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS). Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNN) achieved large successes on object detection, with performance improvement over traditional approaches, which use hand-engineered features. However, due to the challenging driving environment (e.g., large object scale variation, object occlusion, and bad light conditions), popular CNN detectors do not achieve very good object detection accuracy over the KITTI autonomous driving benchmark dataset. In this paper, we propose three enhancements for CNN-based visual object detection for ADAS. To address the large object scale variation challenge, deconvolution and fusion of CNN feature maps are proposed to add context and deeper features for better object detection at low feature map scales. In addition, soft non-maximal suppression (NMS) is applied across object proposals at different feature scales to address the object occlusion challenge. As the cars and pedestrians have distinct aspect ratio features, we measure their aspect ratio statistics and exploit them to set anchor boxes properly for better object matching and localization. The proposed CNN enhancements are evaluated with various image input sizes by experiments over KITTI dataset. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed enhancements with good detection performance over KITTI test set.

MFR-CNN: Incorporating Multi-Scale Features and Global Information for Traffic Object Detection. Object detection plays an important role in intelligent transportation systems and intelligent vehicles. Although the topic of object detection has been studied for decades, it is still challenging to accurately detect objects under complex scenarios. The contributing factors for challenges include diversified object and background appearance, motion blur, adverse weather conditions, and complex i...

Context-Aware Dynamic Feature Extraction for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds Varying density of point clouds increases the difficulty of 3D detection. In this paper, we present a context-aware dynamic network (CADNet) to capture the variance of density by considering both point context and semantic context. Point-level contexts are generated from original point clouds to enlarge the effective receptive filed. They are extracted around the voxelized pillars based on our extended voxelization method and processed with the context encoder in parallel with the pillar features. With a large perception range, we are able to capture the variance of features for potential objects and generate attentive spatial guidance to help adjust the strengths for different regions. In the region proposal network, considering the limited representation ability of traditional convolution where same kernels are shared among different samples and positions, we propose a decomposable dynamic convolutional layer to adapt to the variance of input features by learning from the local semantic context. It adaptively generates the position-dependent coefficients for multiple fixed kernels and combines them to convolve with local features. Based on our dynamic convolution, we design a dual-path convolution block to further improve the representation ability. We conduct experiments on KITTI dataset and the proposed CADNet has achieved superior performance of 3D detection outperforming SECOND and PointPillars by a large margin at the speed of 30 FPS.

China's 12-Year Quest of Autonomous Vehicular Intelligence: The Intelligent Vehicles Future Challenge Program In this article, we introduce the Intelligent Vehicles Future Challenge of China (IVFC), which has lasted 12 years. Some key features of the tests and a few interesting findings of IVFC are selected and presented. Through the IVFCs held between 2009 and 2020, we gradually established a set of theories, methods, and tools to collect tests? data and efficiently evaluate the performance of autonomous vehicles so that we could learn how to improve both the autonomous vehicles and the testing system itself.

Rich Feature Hierarchies for Accurate Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation Object detection performance, as measured on the canonical PASCAL VOC dataset, has plateaued in the last few years. The best-performing methods are complex ensemble systems that typically combine multiple low-level image features with high-level context. In this paper, we propose a simple and scalable detection algorithm that improves mean average precision (mAP) by more than 30% relative to the previous best result on VOC 2012 -- achieving a mAP of 53.3%. Our approach combines two key insights: (1) one can apply high-capacity convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to bottom-up region proposals in order to localize and segment objects and (2) when labeled training data is scarce, supervised pre-training for an auxiliary task, followed by domain-specific fine-tuning, yields a significant performance boost. Since we combine region proposals with CNNs, we call our method R-CNN: Regions with CNN features. We also present experiments that provide insight into what the network learns, revealing a rich hierarchy of image features. Source code for the complete system is available at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rbg/rcnn.

A comparative study of texture measures with classification based on featured distributions This paper evaluates the performance both of some texture measures which have been successfully used in various applications and of some new promising approaches proposed recently. For classification a method based on Kullback discrimination of sample and prototype distributions is used. The classification results for single features with one-dimensional feature value distributions and for pairs of complementary features with two-dimensional distributions are presented

Social Perception and Steering for Online Avatars This paper presents work on a new platform for producing realistic group conversation dynamics in shared virtual environments. An avatar, representing users, should perceive the surrounding social environment just as humans would, and use the perceptual information for driving low level reactive behaviors. Unconscious reactions serve as evidence of life, and can also signal social availability and spatial awareness to others. These behaviors get lost when avatar locomotion requires explicit user control. For automating such behaviors we propose a steering layer in the avatars that manages a set of prioritized behaviors executed at different frequencies, which can be activated or deactivated and combined together. This approach gives us enough flexibility to model the group dynamics of social interactions as a set of social norms that activate relevant steering behaviors. A basic set of behaviors is described for conversations, some of which generate a social force field that makes the formation of conversation groups fluidly adapt to external and internal noise, through avatar repositioning and reorientations. The resulting social group behavior appears relatively robust, but perhaps more importantly, it starts to bring a new sense of relevance and continuity to the virtual bodies that often get separated from the ongoing conversation in the chat window.

Node Reclamation and Replacement for Long-Lived Sensor Networks When deployed for long-term tasks, the energy required to support sensor nodes' activities is far more than the energy that can be preloaded in their batteries. No matter how the battery energy is conserved, once the energy is used up, the network life terminates. Therefore, guaranteeing long-term energy supply has persisted as a big challenge. To address this problem, we propose a node reclamation and replacement (NRR) strategy, with which a mobile robot or human labor called mobile repairman (MR) periodically traverses the sensor network, reclaims nodes with low or no power supply, replaces them with fully charged ones, and brings the reclaimed nodes back to an energy station for recharging. To effectively and efficiently realize the strategy, we develop an adaptive rendezvous-based two-tier scheduling scheme (ARTS) to schedule the replacement/reclamation activities of the MR and the duty cycles of nodes. Extensive simulations have been conducted to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the ARTS scheme.

Haptic feedback for enhancing realism of walking simulations. In this paper, we describe several experiments whose goal is to evaluate the role of plantar vibrotactile feedback in enhancing the realism of walking experiences in multimodal virtual environments. To achieve this goal we built an interactive and a noninteractive multimodal feedback system. While during the use of the interactive system subjects physically walked, during the use of the noninteractive system the locomotion was simulated while subjects were sitting on a chair. In both the configurations subjects were exposed to auditory and audio-visual stimuli presented with and without the haptic feedback. Results of the experiments provide a clear preference toward the simulations enhanced with haptic feedback showing that the haptic channel can lead to more realistic experiences in both interactive and noninteractive configurations. The majority of subjects clearly appreciated the added feedback. However, some subjects found the added feedback unpleasant. This might be due, on one hand, to the limits of the haptic simulation and, on the other hand, to the different individual desire to be involved in the simulations. Our findings can be applied to the context of physical navigation in multimodal virtual environments as well as to enhance the user experience of watching a movie or playing a video game.

Vehicular Sensing Networks in a Smart City: Principles, Technologies and Applications. Given the escalating population across the globe, it has become paramount to construct smart cities, aiming for improving the management of urban flows relying on efficient information and communication technologies (ICT). Vehicular sensing networks (VSNs) play a critical role in maintaining the efficient operation of smart cities. Naturally, there are numerous challenges to be solved before the w...

Dual-objective mixed integer linear program and memetic algorithm for an industrial group scheduling problem Group scheduling problems have attracted much attention owing to their many practical applications. This work proposes a new bi-objective serial-batch group scheduling problem considering the constraints of sequence-dependent setup time, release time, and due time. It is originated from an important industrial process, i.e., wire rod and bar rolling process in steel production systems. Two objecti...

Discovering spatio-temporal causal interactions in traffic data streams The detection of outliers in spatio-temporal traffic data is an important research problem in the data mining and knowledge discovery community. However to the best of our knowledge, the discovery of relationships, especially causal interactions, among detected traffic outliers has not been investigated before. In this paper we propose algorithms which construct outlier causality trees based on temporal and spatial properties of detected outliers. Frequent substructures of these causality trees reveal not only recurring interactions among spatio-temporal outliers, but potential flaws in the design of existing traffic networks. The effectiveness and strength of our algorithms are validated by experiments on a very large volume of real taxi trajectories in an urban road network.

Knowledge harvesting in the big-data era The proliferation of knowledge-sharing communities such as Wikipedia and the progress in scalable information extraction from Web and text sources have enabled the automatic construction of very large knowledge bases. Endeavors of this kind include projects such as DBpedia, Freebase, KnowItAll, ReadTheWeb, and YAGO. These projects provide automatically constructed knowledge bases of facts about named entities, their semantic classes, and their mutual relationships. They contain millions of entities and hundreds of millions of facts about them. Such world knowledge in turn enables cognitive applications and knowledge-centric services like disambiguating natural-language text, semantic search for entities and relations in Web and enterprise data, and entity-oriented analytics over unstructured contents. Prominent examples of how knowledge bases can be harnessed include the Google Knowledge Graph and the IBM Watson question answering system. This tutorial presents state-of-the-art methods, recent advances, research opportunities, and open challenges along this avenue of knowledge harvesting and its applications. Particular emphasis will be on the twofold role of knowledge bases for big-data analytics: using scalable distributed algorithms for harvesting knowledge from Web and text sources, and leveraging entity-centric knowledge for deeper interpretation of and better intelligence with Big Data.

Reservoir computing approaches to recurrent neural network training Echo State Networks and Liquid State Machines introduced a new paradigm in artificial recurrent neural network (RNN) training, where an RNN (the reservoir) is generated randomly and only a readout is trained. The paradigm, becoming known as reservoir computing, greatly facilitated the practical application of RNNs and outperformed classical fully trained RNNs in many tasks. It has lately become a vivid research field with numerous extensions of the basic idea, including reservoir adaptation, thus broadening the initial paradigm to using different methods for training the reservoir and the readout. This review systematically surveys both current ways of generating/adapting the reservoirs and training different types of readouts. It offers a natural conceptual classification of the techniques, which transcends boundaries of the current “brand-names” of reservoir methods, and thus aims to help in unifying the field and providing the reader with a detailed “map” of it.

Comment on "On Discriminative vs. Generative Classifiers: A Comparison of Logistic Regression and Naive Bayes" Comparison of generative and discriminative classifiers is an ever-lasting topic. As an important contribution to this topic, based on their theoretical and empirical comparisons between the naïve Bayes classifier and linear logistic regression, Ng and Jordan (NIPS 841---848, 2001) claimed that there exist two distinct regimes of performance between the generative and discriminative classifiers with regard to the training-set size. In this paper, our empirical and simulation studies, as a complement of their work, however, suggest that the existence of the two distinct regimes may not be so reliable. In addition, for real world datasets, so far there is no theoretically correct, general criterion for choosing between the discriminative and the generative approaches to classification of an observation x into a class y; the choice depends on the relative confidence we have in the correctness of the specification of either p(y|x) or p(x, y) for the data. This can be to some extent a demonstration of why Efron (J Am Stat Assoc 70(352):892---898, 1975) and O'Neill (J Am Stat Assoc 75(369):154---160, 1980) prefer normal-based linear discriminant analysis (LDA) when no model mis-specification occurs but other empirical studies may prefer linear logistic regression instead. Furthermore, we suggest that pairing of either LDA assuming a common diagonal covariance matrix (LDA-驴) or the naïve Bayes classifier and linear logistic regression may not be perfect, and hence it may not be reliable for any claim that was derived from the comparison between LDA-驴 or the naïve Bayes classifier and linear logistic regression to be generalised to all generative and discriminative classifiers.

Dest-ResNet: A Deep Spatiotemporal Residual Network for Hotspot Traffic Speed Prediction. With the ever-increasing urbanization process, the traffic jam has become a common problem in the metropolises around the world, making the traffic speed prediction a crucial and fundamental task. This task is difficult due to the dynamic and intrinsic complexity of the traffic environment in urban cities, yet the emergence of crowd map query data sheds new light on it. In general, a burst of crowd map queries for the same destination in a short duration (called "hotspot'') could lead to traffic congestion. For example, queries of the Capital Gym burst on weekend evenings lead to traffic jams around the gym. However, unleashing the power of crowd map queries is challenging due to the innate spatiotemporal characteristics of the crowd queries. To bridge the gap, this paper firstly discovers hotspots underlying crowd map queries. These discovered hotspots address the spatiotemporal variations. Then Dest-ResNet (Deep spatiotemporal Residual Network) is proposed for hotspot traffic speed prediction. Dest-ResNet is a sequence learning framework that jointly deals with two sequences in different modalities, i.e., the traffic speed sequence and the query sequence. The main idea of Dest-ResNet is to learn to explain and amend the errors caused when the unimodal information is applied individually. In this way, Dest-ResNet addresses the temporal causal correlation between queries and the traffic speed. As a result, Dest-ResNet shows a 30% relative boost over the state-of-the-art methods on real-world datasets from Baidu Map.

Deep Autoencoder Neural Networks for Short-Term Traffic Congestion Prediction of Transportation Networks. Traffic congestion prediction is critical for implementing intelligent transportation systems for improving the efficiency and capacity of transportation networks. However, despite its importance, traffic congestion prediction is severely less investigated compared to traffic flow prediction, which is partially due to the severe lack of large-scale high-quality traffic congestion data and advanced algorithms. This paper proposes an accessible and general workflow to acquire large-scale traffic congestion data and to create traffic congestion datasets based on image analysis. With this workflow we create a dataset named Seattle Area Traffic Congestion Status (SATCS) based on traffic congestion map snapshots from a publicly available online traffic service provider Washington State Department of Transportation. We then propose a deep autoencoder-based neural network model with symmetrical layers for the encoder and the decoder to learn temporal correlations of a transportation network and predicting traffic congestion. Our experimental results on the SATCS dataset show that the proposed DCPN model can efficiently and effectively learn temporal relationships of congestion levels of the transportation network for traffic congestion forecasting. Our method outperforms two other state-of-the-art neural network models in prediction performance, generalization capability, and computation efficiency.

A survey on machine learning for data fusion. •We sum up a group of main challenges that data fusion might face.•We propose a thorough list of requirements to evaluate data fusion methods.•We review the literature of data fusion based on machine learning.•We comment on how a machine learning method can ameliorate fusion performance.•We present significant open issues and valuable future research directions.

Traffic Graph Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network: A Deep Learning Framework for Network-Scale Traffic Learning and Forecasting Traffic forecasting is a particularly challenging application of spatiotemporal forecasting, due to the time-varying traffic patterns and the complicated spatial dependencies on road networks. To address this challenge, we learn the traffic network as a graph and propose a novel deep learning framework, Traffic Graph Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network (TGC-LSTM), to learn the interactions between roadways in the traffic network and forecast the network-wide traffic state. We define the traffic graph convolution based on the physical network topology. The relationship between the proposed traffic graph convolution and the spectral graph convolution is also discussed. An L1-norm on graph convolution weights and an L2-norm on graph convolution features are added to the model's loss function to enhance the interpretability of the proposed model. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms baseline methods on two real-world traffic state datasets. The visualization of the graph convolution weights indicates that the proposed framework can recognize the most influential road segments in real-world traffic networks.

A General Framework for Unmet Demand Prediction in On-Demand Transport Services Emerging on-demand transport services, such as Uber and GoGoVan, usually face the dilemma of demand supply imbalance, meaning that the spatial distributions of orders and drivers are imbalanced. Due to such imbalance, much supply resource is wasted while a considerable amount of order demand cannot be met in time. To address this dilemma, knowing the unmet demand in the near future is of high importance for service providers because they can dispatch their vehicles in advance to alleviate the impending demand supply imbalance, we develop a general framework for predicting the unmet demand in future time slots. Under this framework, we first evaluate the predictability of unmet demand in on-demand transport services and find that unmet demand is highly predictable. Then, we extract both static and dynamic urban features relevant to unmet demand from data sets in multiple domains. Finally, multiple prediction models are trained to predict unmet demand by using the extracted features. As demonstrated via experiments, the proposed framework can predict unmet demand in on-demand transport services effectively and flexibly.

Accurate Self-Localization in RFID Tag Information Grids Using FIR Filtering Grid navigation spaces nested with the radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags are promising for industrial and other needs, because each tag can deliver information about a local two-dimensional or three-dimensional surrounding. The approach, however, requires high accuracy in vehicle self-localization. Otherwise, errors may lead to collisions; possibly even fatal. We propose a new extended finite impulse response (EFIR) filtering algorithm and show that it meets this need. The EFIR filter requires an optimal averaging interval, but does not involve the noise statistics which are often not well known to the engineer. It is more accurate than the extended Kalman filter (EKF) under real operation conditions and its iterative algorithm has the Kalman form. Better performance of the proposed EFIR filter is demonstrated based on extensive simulations in a comparison to EKF, which is widely used in RFID tag grids. We also show that errors in noise covariances may provoke divergence in EKF, whereas the EFIR filter remains stable and is thus more robust.

LMI-based relaxed nonquadratic stabilization conditions for nonlinear systems in the Takagi-Sugeno's form This paper presents the stabilization analysis for a class of nonlinear systems that are represented by a Takagi and Sugeno (TS) discrete fuzzy model (Takagi and Sugeno IEEE Trans. Systems Man Cybern. 15(1)(1985)116). The main result given here concerns their stabilization using new control laws and new nonquadratic Lyapunov functions. New relaxed conditions and linear matrix inequality-based design are proposed that allow outperforming previous results found in the literature. Two examples are also provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the approaches.

Forensically Determining The Order Of Signal Processing Operations Currently, many forensic techniques have been developed to determine which processing operations were used to manipulate a multimedia signal. Determining the order in which these operations were applied, however, remains an open challenge. Understanding this order is important because it not only provides greater insight into a signal's processing history, but it can also be used to determine a forger's behavior patterns or provide insight into who manipulated a signal. In this paper, we propose a new forensic detection framework that can be used determine the order in which manipulations were applied to a signal. Additionally, we introduce the notion of a conditional fingerprint to describe how a manipulation's fingerprints can change under subsequent processing. We identify the conditional fingerprints of contrast enhancement followed by resizing, and use our framework to develop an algorithm to determine the order in which resizing and contrast enhancement were applied to an image.

Particle swarm optimization algorithm: an overview. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a population-based stochastic optimization algorithm motivated by intelligent collective behavior of some animals such as flocks of birds or schools of fish. Since presented in 1995, it has experienced a multitude of enhancements. As researchers have learned about the technique, they derived new versions aiming to different demands, developed new applications in a host of areas, published theoretical studies of the effects of the various parameters and proposed many variants of the algorithm. This paper introduces its origin and background and carries out the theory analysis of the PSO. Then, we analyze its present situation of research and application in algorithm structure, parameter selection, topology structure, discrete PSO algorithm and parallel PSO algorithm, multi-objective optimization PSO and its engineering applications. Finally, the existing problems are analyzed and future research directions are presented.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

An RFID-Based Mobile Robot Localization Method Combining Phase Difference and Readability A novel radio frequency identification (RFID)-based mobile robot global localization method combining two kinds of RFID signal information, i.e., phase difference and readability, is proposed. Specifically, a phase difference model and a classification logic strategy based on readability are built and integrated into a particle filter localization algorithm. Compared with existing RFID localizatio...

Self-triggered coordination of robotic networks for optimal deployment This paper studies a deployment problem for a group of robots where individual agents operate with outdated information about each other's locations. Our objective is to understand to what extent outdated information is still useful and at which point it becomes essential to obtain new, up-to-date information. We propose a self-triggered coordination algorithm based on spatial partitioning techniques with uncertain information. We analyze its correctness in synchronous and asynchronous scenarios, and establish the same convergence guarantees that a synchronous algorithm with perfect information at all times would achieve. The technical approach combines computational geometry, set-valued stability analysis, and event-based systems.

Robust Control for Mobility and Wireless Communication in Cyber-Physical Systems With Application to Robot Teams. In this paper, a system architecture to provide end-to-end network connectivity for autonomous teams of robots is discussed. The core of the proposed system is a cyber-physical controller whose goal is to ensure network connectivity as robots move to accomplish their assigned tasks. Due to channel quality uncertainties inherent to wireless propagation, we adopt a stochastic model where achievable ...

Consensus Control Under Communication Delay in a Three-Robot System: Design and Experiments A consensus-control protocol is designed and implemented here on a three-robot system arranged on a horizontal platform, in which a camera system is used to track robot positions, and a personal computer broadcasts commands to the robots based on this protocol via a Bluetooth connection, where such commands are affected by time delays. The design involves some salient features of this protocol based on a graph-based approach, an input–output linearization scheme, and addressing uncertainties in the control problem. By implementing this design on experiments, we show that consensus of the robots can be successfully achieved, and their speed of reaching consensus can be systematically improved. Experimental results also strongly agree with those obtained from nonlinear simulations.

Cooperative Robot Localization Using Event-Triggered Estimation This paper describes a novel communication-spare cooperative localization algorithm for a team of mobile unmanned robotic vehicles. Exploiting an event-based estimation paradigm, robots only send measurements to neighbors when the expected innovation for state estimation is high. Because agents know the event-triggering condition for measurements to be sent, the lack of a measurement is thus also informative and fused into state estimates. The robots use a covariance intersection mechanism to occasionally synchronize their local estimates of the full network state. In addition, heuristic balancing dynamics on the robots' covariance-intersection-triggering thresholds ensure that, in large-diameter networks, the local error covariances remains below desired bounds across the network. Simulations on both linear and nonlinear dynamics/measurement models show that the event-triggering approach achieves nearly optimal state estimation performance in a wide range of operating conditions, even when using only a fraction of the communication cost required by conventional full data sharing. The robustness of the proposed approach to lossy communications as well as the relationship between network topology and covariance-intersection-based synchronization requirements are also examined.

Performance analysis of multirobot Cooperative localization This paper studies the accuracy of position estimation for groups of mobile robots performing cooperative localization. We consider the case of teams comprised of possibly heterogeneous robots and provide analytical expressions for the upper bound on their expected positioning uncertainty. This bound is determined as a function of the sensors' noise covariance and the eigenvalues of the relative position measurement graph (RPMG), i.e., the weighted directed graph which represents the network of robot-to-robot exteroceptive measurements. The RPMG is employed as a key element in this analysis, and its properties are related to the localization performance of the team. It is shown that, for a robot group of a certain size, the maximum expected rate of uncertainty increase is independent of the accuracy and number of relative position measurements and depends only on the accuracy of the proprioceptive and orientation sensors on the robots. Additionally, the effects of changes in the topology of the RPMG are studied, and it is shown that, at steady-state, these reconfigurations do not inflict any loss in localization precision. Experimental data, as well as simulation results that validate the theoretical analysis, are presented

G2-type SRMPC scheme for synchronous manipulation of two redundant robot arms. In this paper, to remedy the joint-angle drift phenomenon for manipulation of two redundant robot arms, a novel scheme for simultaneous repetitive motion planning and control (SRMPC) at the joint-acceleration level is proposed, which consists of two subschemes. To do so, the performance index of each SRMPC subscheme is derived and designed by employing the gradient dynamics twice, of which a convergence theorem and its proof are presented. In addition, for improving the accuracy of the motion planning and control, position error, and velocity, error feedbacks are incorporated into the forward kinematics equation and analyzed via Zhang neural-dynamics method. Then the two subschemes are simultaneously reformulated as two quadratic programs (QPs), which are finally unified into one QP problem. Furthermore, a piecewise-linear projection equation-based neural network (PLPENN) is used to solve the unified QP problem, which can handle the strictly convex QP problem in an inverse-free manner. More importantly, via such a unified QP formulation and the corresponding PLPENN solver, the synchronism of two redundant robot arms is guaranteed. Finally, two given tasks are fulfilled by 2 three-link and 2 five-link planar robot arms, respectively. Computer-simulation results validate the efficacy and accuracy of the SRMPC scheme and the corresponding PLPENN solver for synchronous manipulation of two redundant robot arms.

Crowd sensing of traffic anomalies based on human mobility and social media The advances in mobile computing and social networking services enable people to probe the dynamics of a city. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting and describing traffic anomalies using crowd sensing with two forms of data, human mobility and social media. Traffic anomalies are caused by accidents, control, protests, sport events, celebrations, disasters and other events. Unlike existing traffic-anomaly-detection methods, we identify anomalies according to drivers' routing behavior on an urban road network. Here, a detected anomaly is represented by a sub-graph of a road network where drivers' routing behaviors significantly differ from their original patterns. We then try to describe the detected anomaly by mining representative terms from the social media that people posted when the anomaly happened. The system for detecting such traffic anomalies can benefit both drivers and transportation authorities, e.g., by notifying drivers approaching an anomaly and suggesting alternative routes, as well as supporting traffic jam diagnosis and dispersal. We evaluate our system with a GPS trajectory dataset generated by over 30,000 taxicabs over a period of 3 months in Beijing, and a dataset of tweets collected from WeiBo, a Twitter-like social site in China. The results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our system.

LMM: latency-aware micro-service mashup in mobile edge computing environment Internet of Things (IoT) applications introduce a set of stringent requirements (e.g., low latency, high bandwidth) to network and computing paradigm. 5G networks are faced with great challenges for supporting IoT services. The centralized cloud computing paradigm also becomes inefficient for those stringent requirements. Only extending spectrum resources cannot solve the problem effectively. Mobile edge computing offers an IT service environment at the Radio Access Network edge and presents great opportunities for the development of IoT applications. With the capability to reduce latency and offer an improved user experience, mobile edge computing becomes a key technology toward 5G. To achieve abundant sharing, complex IoT applications have been implemented as a set of lightweight micro-services that are distributed among containers over the mobile edge network. How to produce the optimal collocation of suitable micro-service for an application in mobile edge computing environment is an important issue that should be addressed. To address this issue, we propose a latency-aware micro-service mashup approach in this paper. Firstly, the problem is formulated into an integer nonlinear programming. Then, we prove the NP-hardness of the problem by reducing it into the delay constrained least cost problem. Finally, we propose an approximation latency-aware micro-service mashup approach to solve the problem. Experiment results show that the proposed approach achieves a substantial reduction in network resource consumption while still ensuring the latency constraint.

Symbolic model checking for real-time systems We describe finite-state programs over real-numbered time in a guarded-command language with real-valued clocks or, equivalently, as finite automata with real-valued clocks. Model checking answers the question which states of a real-time program satisfy a branching-time specification (given in an extension of CTL with clock variables). We develop an algorithm that computes this set of states symbolically as a fixpoint of a functional on state predicates, without constructing the state space. For this purpose, we introduce a μ-calculus on computation trees over real-numbered time. Unfortunately, many standard program properties, such as response for all nonzeno execution sequences (during which time diverges), cannot be characterized by fixpoints: we show that the expressiveness of the timed μ-calculus is incomparable to the expressiveness of timed CTL. Fortunately, this result does not impair the symbolic verification of "implementable" real-time programs-those whose safety constraints are machine-closed with respect to diverging time and whose fairness constraints are restricted to finite upper bounds on clock values. All timed CTL properties of such programs are shown to be computable as finitely approximable fixpoints in a simple decidable theory.

A novel full structure optimization algorithm for radial basis probabilistic neural networks. In this paper, a novel full structure optimization algorithm for radial basis probabilistic neural networks (RBPNN) is proposed. Firstly, a minimum volume covering hyperspheres (MVCH) algorithm is proposed to heuristically select the initial hidden layer centers of the RBPNN, and then the recursive orthogonal least square (ROLS) algorithm combined with the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is adopted to further optimize the initial structure of the RBPNN. Finally, the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm are evaluated through a plant species identification task involving 50 plant species.

Completely Pinpointing the Missing RFID Tags in a Time-Efficient Way Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has been widely used in inventory management in many scenarios, e.g., warehouses, retail stores, hospitals, etc. This paper investigates a challenging problem of complete identification of missing tags in large-scale RFID systems. Although this problem has attracted extensive attention from academy and industry, the existing work can hardly satisfy the stringent real-time requirements. In this paper, a Slot Filter-based Missing Tag Identification (SFMTI) protocol is proposed to reconcile some expected collision slots into singleton slots and filter out the expected empty slots as well as the unreconcilable collision slots, thereby achieving the improved time-efficiency. The theoretical analysis is conducted to minimize the execution time of the proposed SFMTI. We then propose a cost-effective method to extend SFMTI to the multi-reader scenarios. The extensive simulation experiments and performance results demonstrate that the proposed SFMTI protocol outperforms the most promising Iterative ID-free Protocol (IIP) by reducing nearly 45% of the required execution time, and is just within a factor of 1.18 from the lower bound of the minimum execution time.

A multi-objective and PSO based energy efficient path design for mobile sink in wireless sensor networks. Data collection through mobile sink (MS) in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is an effective solution to the hot-spot or sink-hole problem caused by multi-hop routing using the static sink. Rendezvous point (RP) based MS path design is a common and popular technique used in this regard. However, design of the optimal path is a well-known NP-hard problem. Therefore, an evolutionary approach like multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) can prove to be a very promising and reasonable approach to solve the same. In this paper, we first present a Linear Programming formulation for the stated problem and then, propose an MOPSO-based algorithm to design an energy efficient trajectory for the MS. The algorithm is presented with an efficient particle encoding scheme and derivation of a proficient multi-objective fitness function. We use Pareto dominance in MOPSO for obtaining both local and global best guides for each particle. We carry out rigorous simulation experiments on the proposed algorithm and compare the results with two existing algorithms namely, tree cluster based data gathering algorithm (TCBDGA) and energy aware sink relocation (EASR). The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm performs better than both of them in terms of various performance metrics. The results are also validated through the statistical test, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and its least significant difference (LSD) post hoc analysis.

Hardware Circuits Design and Performance Evaluation of a Soft Lower Limb Exoskeleton Soft lower limb exoskeletons (LLEs) are wearable devices that have good potential in walking rehabilitation and augmentation. While a few studies focused on the structure design and assistance force optimization of the soft LLEs, rarely work has been conducted on the hardware circuits design. The main purpose of this work is to present a new soft LLE for walking efficiency improvement and introduce its hardware circuits design. A soft LLE for hip flexion assistance and a hardware circuits system with scalability were proposed. To assess the efficacy of the soft LLE, the experimental tests that evaluate the sensor data acquisition, force tracking performance, lower limb muscle activity and metabolic cost were conducted. The time error in the peak assistance force was just 1%. The reduction in the normalized root-mean-square EMG of the rectus femoris was 7.1%. The net metabolic cost in exoskeleton on condition was reduced by 7.8% relative to walking with no exoskeleton. The results show that the designed hardware circuits can be applied to the soft LLE and the soft LLE is able to improve walking efficiency of wearers.

An Uneven Cluster-Based Mobile Charging Algorithm for Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks Wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSN) have attracted considerable attention in recent years due to the constant energy supply for battery-powered sensor nodes. However, current technologies only enable the mobile charger to replenish energy for one single node at a time. This method has poor scalability and is not suitable for large-scale WRSNs. Recently, wireless energy transfer technology based on multi-hop energy transfer has made great progress. It provides fundamental support to alleviate the scalability problem. In this paper, the node energy replenishment problem is formulated into an optimization problem. The optimization objective is to minimize the number of non-functional nodes. We propose the uneven cluster-based mobile charging (UCMC) algorithm for WRSNs. An uneven clustering scheme and a novel charging path planning scheme are incorporated in the UCMC algorithm. The simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm can achieve energy balance, reduce the number of dead nodes, and prolong the network lifetime.

Mean Shift, Mode Seeking, and Clustering Mean shift, a simple iterative procedure that shifts each data point to the average of data points in its neighborhood, is generalized and analyzed in this paper. This generalization makes some k-means like clustering algorithms its special cases. It is shown that mean shift is a mode-seeking process on a surface constructed with a 驴shadow驴 kernel. For Gaussian kernels, mean shift is a gradient mapping. Convergence is studied for mean shift iterations. Cluster analysis is treated as a deterministic problem of finding a fixed point of mean shift that characterizes the data. Applications in clustering and Hough transform are demonstrated. Mean shift is also considered as an evolutionary strategy that performs multistart global optimization.

An effective implementation of the Lin–Kernighan traveling salesman heuristic This paper describes an implementation of the Lin–Kernighan heuristic, one of the most successful methods for generating optimal or near-optimal solutions for the symmetric traveling salesman problem (TSP). Computational tests show that the implementation is highly effective. It has found optimal solutions for all solved problem instances we have been able to obtain, including a 13,509-city problem (the largest non-trivial problem instance solved to optimality today).

SGCO: Stabilized Green Crosshaul Orchestration for Dense IoT Offloading Services. The next-generation mobile network anticipates integrated heterogeneous fronthaul and backhaul technologies referred to as a unified crosshaul architecture. The crosshaul enables a flexible and cost-efficient infrastructure for handling mobile data tsunami from dense Internet of things (IoT). However, stabilization, energy efficiency, and latency have not been jointly considered in the optimizatio...

I-SEP: An Improved Routing Protocol for Heterogeneous WSN for IoT-Based Environmental Monitoring Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a virtual layer in the paradigm of the Internet of Things (IoT). It inter-relates information associated with the physical domain to the IoT drove computational systems. WSN provides an ubiquitous access to location, the status of different entities of the environment, and data acquisition for long-term IoT monitoring. Since energy is a major constraint in the design process of a WSN, recent advances have led to project various energy-efficient protocols. Routing of data involves energy expenditure in considerable amount. In recent times, various heuristic clustering protocols have been discussed to solve the purpose. This article is an improvement of the existing stable election protocol (SEP) that implements a threshold-based cluster head (CH) selection for a heterogeneous network. The threshold maintains uniform energy distribution between member and CH nodes. The sensor nodes are also categorized into three different types called normal, intermediate, and advanced depending on the initial energy supply to distribute the network load evenly. The simulation result shows that the proposed scheme outperforms SEP and DEEC protocols with an improvement of 300% in network lifetime and 56% in throughput.

Adaptive Wireless Power Transfer in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. We investigate the interesting impact of mobility on the problem of efficient wireless power transfer in ad hoc networks. We consider a set of mobile agents (consuming energy to perform certain sensing and communication tasks), and a single static charger (with finite energy) which can recharge the agents when they get in its range. In particular, we focus on the problem of efficiently computing the appropriate range of the charger with the goal of prolonging the network lifetime. We first demonstrate (under the realistic assumption of fixed energy supplies) the limitations of any fixed charging range and, therefore, the need for (and power of) a dynamic selection of the charging range, by adapting to the behavior of the mobile agents which is revealed in an online manner. We investigate the complexity of optimizing the selection of such an adaptive charging range, by showing that two simplified offline optimization problems (closely related to the online one) are NP-hard. To effectively address the involved performance trade-offs, we finally present a variety of adaptive heuristics, assuming different levels of agent information regarding their mobility and energy.

Improving charging capacity for wireless sensor networks by deploying one mobile vehicle with multiple removable chargers. Wireless energy transfer is a promising technology to prolong the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), by employing charging vehicles to replenish energy to lifetime-critical sensors. Existing studies on sensor charging assumed that one or multiple charging vehicles being deployed. Such an assumption may have its limitation for a real sensor network. On one hand, it usually is insufficient to employ just one vehicle to charge many sensors in a large-scale sensor network due to the limited charging capacity of the vehicle or energy expirations of some sensors prior to the arrival of the charging vehicle. On the other hand, although the employment of multiple vehicles can significantly improve the charging capability, it is too costly in terms of the initial investment and maintenance costs on these vehicles. In this paper, we propose a novel charging model that a charging vehicle can carry multiple low-cost removable chargers and each charger is powered by a portable high-volume battery. When there are energy-critical sensors to be charged, the vehicle can carry the chargers to charge multiple sensors simultaneously, by placing one portable charger in the vicinity of one sensor. Under this novel charging model, we study the scheduling problem of the charging vehicle so that both the dead duration of sensors and the total travel distance of the mobile vehicle per tour are minimized. Since this problem is NP-hard, we instead propose a (3+ϵ)-approximation algorithm if the residual lifetime of each sensor can be ignored; otherwise, we devise a novel heuristic algorithm, where ϵ is a given constant with 0 < ϵ ≤ 1. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms through experimental simulations. Experimental results show that the performance of the proposed algorithms are very promising.

Joint Optimization of Charging Location and Time for Network Lifetime Extension in WRSNs Wireless rechargeable sensor networks (WRSNs) have emerged as a potential solution to solve the challenge of prolonging battery-powered sensor networks’ lifetime. In a WRSN, a mobile charger moves around and charges the rechargeable sensors when stopping at charging spots. This paper newly considers a joint optimization of the charging location and the charging time to avoid node failure in WRSNs. We formulate the optimization and propose a solution for that. The proposal includes an algorithm to find a list of potential charging locations and their associated optimal charging time. Moreover, the Q-learning technique is adopted to determine the optimal next charging location among the candidates. We implement the algorithm and conduct experiments to compare it to the related works. The results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the others in terms of network lifetime. Specifically, the highest performance gap of our proposal to the best algorithm among the others is 8.29 times.

Mobile Charging in Wireless-Powered Sensor Networks: Optimal Scheduling and Experimental Implementation. Wireless radio frequency (RF) energy transfer is a promising technology to provide a reliability-guaranteed power supply for wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we consider a special wireless-powered sensor network consisting of a mobile energy station that can travel through a preplanned path to charge wireless-powered sensors located in the considered area. We develop a hardware platform us...

Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition Deeper neural networks are more difficult to train. We present a residual learning framework to ease the training of networks that are substantially deeper than those used previously. We explicitly reformulate the layers as learning residual functions with reference to the layer inputs, instead of learning unreferenced functions. We provide comprehensive empirical evidence showing that these residual networks are easier to optimize, and can gain accuracy from considerably increased depth. On the ImageNet dataset we evaluate residual nets with a depth of up to 152 layers - 8× deeper than VGG nets [40] but still having lower complexity. An ensemble of these residual nets achieves 3.57% error on the ImageNet test set. This result won the 1st place on the ILSVRC 2015 classification task. We also present analysis on CIFAR-10 with 100 and 1000 layers. The depth of representations is of central importance for many visual recognition tasks. Solely due to our extremely deep representations, we obtain a 28% relative improvement on the COCO object detection dataset. Deep residual nets are foundations of our submissions to ILSVRC & COCO 2015 competitions1, where we also won the 1st places on the tasks of ImageNet detection, ImageNet localization, COCO detection, and COCO segmentation.

Learning invariant features through topographic filter maps Several recently-proposed architectures for high-performance object recognition are composed of two main stages: a feature extraction stage that extracts locally-invariant feature vectors from regularly spaced image patches, and a somewhat generic supervised classifier. The first stage is often composed of three main modules: (1) a bank of filters (often oriented edge detectors); (2) a non-linear transform, such as a point-wise squashing functions, quantization, or normalization; (3) a spatial pooling operation which combines the outputs of similar filters over neighboring regions. We propose a method that automatically learns such feature extractors in an unsupervised fashion by simultaneously learning the filters and the pooling units that combine multiple filter outputs together. The method automatically generates topographic maps of similar filters that extract features of orientations, scales, and positions. These similar filters are pooled together, producing locally-invariant outputs. The learned feature descriptors give comparable results as SIFT on image recognition tasks for which SIFT is well suited, and better results than SIFT on tasks for which SIFT is less well suited.

Routing Optimization In Vehicular Networks: A New Approach Based On Multiobjective Metrics And Minimum Spanning Tree Recently, distributed mobile wireless computing is becoming a very important communications paradigm, due to its flexibility to adapt to different mobile applications. As many other distributed networks, routing operations assume a crucial importance in system optimization, especially when considering dense urban areas, where interference effects cannot be neglected. In this paper a new routing protocol for VANETs and a new scheme of multichannel management are proposed. In particular, an interference-aware routing scheme, for multiradio vehicular networks, wherein each node is equipped with a multichannel radio interface is investigated. NS-2 has been used to validate the proposed Multiobjective routing protocol (MO-RP) protocol in terms of packet delivery ratio, throughput, end-to-end delay, and overhead.

Adaptive Fuzzy Bounded Control for Consensus of Multiple Strict-Feedback Nonlinear Systems. This paper studies the adaptive fuzzy bounded control problem for leader-follower multiagent systems, where each follower is modeled by the uncertain nonlinear strict-feedback system. Combining the fuzzy approximation with the dynamic surface control, an adaptive fuzzy control scheme is developed to guarantee the output consensus of all agents under directed communication topologies. Different fro...

Learning Interpretable Deep State Space Model for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting. Probabilistic time series forecasting involves estimating the distribution of future based on its history, which is essential for risk management in downstream decision-making. We propose a deep state space model for probabilistic time series forecasting whereby the non-linear emission model and transition model are parameterized by networks and the dependency is modeled by recurrent neural nets. We take the automatic relevance determination (ARD) view and devise a network to exploit the exogenous variables in addition to time series. In particular, our ARD network can incorporate the uncertainty of the exogenous variables and eventually helps identify useful exogenous variables and suppress those irrelevant for forecasting. The distribution of multi-step ahead forecasts are approximated by Monte Carlo simulation. We show in experiments that our model produces accurate and sharp probabilistic forecasts. The estimated uncertainty of our forecasting also realistically increases over time, in a spontaneous manner.

Multiscale contrast similarity deviation: An effective and efficient index for perceptual image quality assessment. Perceptual image quality assessment (IQA) uses a computational model to assess the image quality in a fashion consistent with human opinions. A good IQA model should consider both the effectiveness and efficiency. To meet this need, a new model called multiscale contrast similarity deviation (MCSD) is developed in this paper. Contrast is a distinctive visual attribute closely related to the quality of an image. To further explore the contrast features, we resort to the multiscale representation. Although the contrast and the multiscale representation have already been used by other IQA indices, few have reached the goals of effectiveness and efficiency simultaneously. We compared our method with other state-of-the-art methods using six well-known databases. The experimental results showed that the proposed method yielded the best performance in terms of correlation with human judgments. Furthermore, it is also efficient when compared with other competing IQA models.

Combined invariants to similarity transformation and to blur using orthogonal Zernike moments. The derivation of moment invariants has been extensively investigated in the past decades. In this paper, we construct a set of invariants derived from Zernike moments which is simultaneously invariant to similarity transformation and to convolution with circularly symmetric point spread function (PSF). Two main contributions are provided: the theoretical framework for deriving the Zernike moments of a blurred image and the way to construct the combined geometric-blur invariants. The performance of the proposed descriptors is evaluated with various PSFs and similarity transformations. The comparison of the proposed method with the existing ones is also provided in terms of pattern recognition accuracy, template matching and robustness to noise. Experimental results show that the proposed descriptors perform on the overall better.

Fast computation of Jacobi-Fourier moments for invariant image recognition The Jacobi-Fourier moments (JFMs) provide a wide class of orthogonal rotation invariant moments (ORIMs) which are useful for many image processing, pattern recognition and computer vision applications. They, however, suffer from high time complexity and numerical instability at high orders of moment. In this paper, a fast method based on the recursive computation of radial kernel function of JFMs is proposed which not only reduces time complexity but also improves their numerical stability. Fast recursive method for the computation of Jacobi-Fourier moments is proposed.The proposed method not only reduces time complexity but also improves numerical stability of moments.Better image reconstruction is achieved with lower reconstruction error.Proposed method is useful for many image processing, pattern recognition and computer vision applications.

Radial shifted Legendre moments for image analysis and invariant image recognition. The rotation, scaling and translation invariant property of image moments has a high significance in image recognition. Legendre moments as a classical orthogonal moment have been widely used in image analysis and recognition. Since Legendre moments are defined in Cartesian coordinate, the rotation invariance is difficult to achieve. In this paper, we first derive two types of transformed Legendre polynomial: substituted and weighted radial shifted Legendre polynomials. Based on these two types of polynomials, two radial orthogonal moments, named substituted radial shifted Legendre moments and weighted radial shifted Legendre moments (SRSLMs and WRSLMs) are proposed. The proposed moments are orthogonal in polar coordinate domain and can be thought as generalized and orthogonalized complex moments. They have better image reconstruction performance, lower information redundancy and higher noise robustness than the existing radial orthogonal moments. At last, a mathematical framework for obtaining the rotation, scaling and translation invariants of these two types of radial shifted Legendre moments is provided. Theoretical and experimental results show the superiority of the proposed methods in terms of image reconstruction capability and invariant recognition accuracy under both noisy and noise-free conditions.

Lossless medical image watermarking method based on significant difference of cellular automata transform coefficient. Conventional medical image watermarking techniques focus on improving invisibility and robustness of the watermarking mechanism to prevent medical disputes. This paper proposes a medical image watermarking algorithm based on the significant difference of cellular automata transform (CAT) for copyright protection. The medical image is firstly subsampled into four subimages, and two images are randomly chosen to obtain two low-frequency bandwidths using CAT. Coefficients within a low-frequency bandwidth are important information in an image. Hence, the difference between two low-frequency bandwidths is used as an important feature in the medical image. From these important features, watermarks and cover images can be used to generate an ownership share image (OSI) used for verifying the medical image. Besides appearing like cover images, the OSI will also be able to register with a third party. When a suspected medical image requires verification, the important features from the suspected medical image are first extracted. The master share image (MSI) can be generated from the important features from the suspected medical image. Lastly, the OSI and MSI can be combined to extract the watermark to verify the suspected medical image. The advantage of our proposed method is that the medical image does not require alteration to protect the copyright of the medical image. This means that while the image is protected, medical disputes will be unlikely and the appearance of the registered OSI will carry significant data to make management more convenient. Lastly, the proposed method has the features of having better security, invisibility, and robustness. Moreover, experimental results have demonstrated that our method results in good performance.

Robust watermarking scheme for color image based on quaternion-type moment invariants and visual cryptography. This paper introduces a novel robust watermarking scheme for copyright protection of color image based on quaternion-type moment invariants and visual cryptography. As a secure way to allow secret sharing of images, visual cryptography realizes encryption of classified information and the decryption is performed through human visual system. The proposed scheme represents the color image into a quaternion matrix, so that it can deal with the multichannel information in a holistic way. Then the quaternion moments are applied to extract the invariant features, which are crucial to generate the master share. Together with the scrambled watermark, they are used for constructing the ownership share based on visual cryptography. Afterwards, the ownership share is registered and responsible for authentication. A set of experiments has been conducted to illustrate the validity and feasibility of the proposed scheme as well as better robustness against different attacks.

Two-Dimensional Polar Harmonic Transforms for Invariant Image Representation This paper introduces a set of 2D transforms, based on a set of orthogonal projection bases, to generate a set of features which are invariant to rotation. We call these transforms Polar Harmonic Transforms (PHTs). Unlike the well-known Zernike and pseudo-Zernike moments, the kernel computation of PHTs is extremely simple and has no numerical stability issue whatsoever. This implies that PHTs encompass the orthogonality and invariance advantages of Zernike and pseudo-Zernike moments, but are free from their inherent limitations. This also means that PHTs are well suited for application where maximal discriminant information is needed. Furthermore, PHTs make available a large set of features for further feature selection in the process of seeking for the best discriminative or representative features for a particular application.

Tabu Search - Part I

Joint Optimization of Radio and Computational Resources for Multicell Mobile-Edge Computing Migrating computational intensive tasks from mobile devices to more resourceful cloud servers is a promising technique to increase the computational capacity of mobile devices while saving their battery energy. In this paper, we consider a MIMO multicell system where multiple mobile users (MUs) ask for computation offloading to a common cloud server. We formulate the offloading problem as the joint optimization of the radio resources􀀀the transmit precoding matrices of the MUs􀀀and the computational resources􀀀the CPU cycles/second assigned by the cloud to each MU􀀀in order to minimize the overall users’ energy consumption, while meeting latency constraints. The resulting optimization problem is nonconvex (in the objective function and constraints). Nevertheless, in the single-user case, we are able to compute the global optimal solution in closed form. In the more challenging multiuser scenario, we propose an iterative algorithm, based on a novel successive convex approximation technique, converging to a local optimal solution of the original nonconvex problem. We then show that the proposed algorithmic framework naturally leads to a distributed and parallel implementation across the radio access points, requiring only a limited coordination/signaling with the cloud. Numerical results show that the proposed schemes outperform disjoint optimization algorithms.

Symbolic model checking for real-time systems We describe finite-state programs over real-numbered time in a guarded-command language with real-valued clocks or, equivalently, as finite automata with real-valued clocks. Model checking answers the question which states of a real-time program satisfy a branching-time specification (given in an extension of CTL with clock variables). We develop an algorithm that computes this set of states symbolically as a fixpoint of a functional on state predicates, without constructing the state space. For this purpose, we introduce a μ-calculus on computation trees over real-numbered time. Unfortunately, many standard program properties, such as response for all nonzeno execution sequences (during which time diverges), cannot be characterized by fixpoints: we show that the expressiveness of the timed μ-calculus is incomparable to the expressiveness of timed CTL. Fortunately, this result does not impair the symbolic verification of "implementable" real-time programs-those whose safety constraints are machine-closed with respect to diverging time and whose fairness constraints are restricted to finite upper bounds on clock values. All timed CTL properties of such programs are shown to be computable as finitely approximable fixpoints in a simple decidable theory.

Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization: An optimization method for continuous non-linear large scale problems An efficient optimization method called 'Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization (TLBO)' is proposed in this paper for large scale non-linear optimization problems for finding the global solutions. The proposed method is based on the effect of the influence of a teacher on the output of learners in a class. The basic philosophy of the method is explained in detail. The effectiveness of the method is tested on many benchmark problems with different characteristics and the results are compared with other population based methods.

An Automatic Screening Approach for Obstructive Sleep Apnea Diagnosis Based on Single-Lead Electrocardiogram Traditional approaches for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) diagnosis are apt to using multiple channels of physiological signals to detect apnea events by dividing the signals into equal-length segments, which may lead to incorrect apnea event detection and weaken the performance of OSA diagnosis. This paper proposes an automatic-segmentation-based screening approach with the single channel of Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal for OSA subject diagnosis, and the main work of the proposed approach lies in three aspects: (i) an automatic signal segmentation algorithm is adopted for signal segmentation instead of the equal-length segmentation rule; (ii) a local median filter is improved for reduction of the unexpected RR intervals before signal segmentation; (iii) the designed OSA severity index and additional admission information of OSA suspects are plugged into support vector machine (SVM) for OSA subject diagnosis. A real clinical example from PhysioNet database is provided to validate the proposed approach and an average accuracy of 97.41% for subject diagnosis is obtained which demonstrates the effectiveness for OSA diagnosis.

Automated Detection of Obstructive Sleep Apnea Events from a Single-Lead Electrocardiogram Using a Convolutional Neural Network. In this study, we propose a method for the automated detection of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) from a single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) using a convolutional neural network (CNN). A CNN model was designed with six optimized convolution layers including activation, pooling, and dropout layers. One-dimensional (1D) convolution, rectified linear units (ReLU), and max pooling were applied to the convolution, activation, and pooling layers, respectively. For training and evaluation of the CNN model, a single-lead ECG dataset was collected from 82 subjects with OSA and was divided into training (including data from 63 patients with 34,281 events) and testing (including data from 19 patients with 8571 events) datasets. Using this CNN model, a precision of 0.99%, a recall of 0.99%, and an F-score of 0.99% were attained with the training dataset; these values were all 0.96% when the CNN was applied to the testing dataset. These results show that the proposed CNN model can be used to detect OSA accurately on the basis of a single-lead ECG. Ultimately, this CNN model may be used as a screening tool for those suspected to suffer from OSA.

Hardware Circuits Design and Performance Evaluation of a Soft Lower Limb Exoskeleton Soft lower limb exoskeletons (LLEs) are wearable devices that have good potential in walking rehabilitation and augmentation. While a few studies focused on the structure design and assistance force optimization of the soft LLEs, rarely work has been conducted on the hardware circuits design. The main purpose of this work is to present a new soft LLE for walking efficiency improvement and introduce its hardware circuits design. A soft LLE for hip flexion assistance and a hardware circuits system with scalability were proposed. To assess the efficacy of the soft LLE, the experimental tests that evaluate the sensor data acquisition, force tracking performance, lower limb muscle activity and metabolic cost were conducted. The time error in the peak assistance force was just 1%. The reduction in the normalized root-mean-square EMG of the rectus femoris was 7.1%. The net metabolic cost in exoskeleton on condition was reduced by 7.8% relative to walking with no exoskeleton. The results show that the designed hardware circuits can be applied to the soft LLE and the soft LLE is able to improve walking efficiency of wearers.

Multi-Tenant Cross-Slice Resource Orchestration: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach. In a software-defined radio access network (RAN), a major challenge lies in how to support diverse services for mobile users (MUs) over a common physical network infrastructure. Network slicing is a promising solution to tailor the network to match such service requests. This paper considers a software-defined RAN, where a limited number of channels are auctioned across scheduling slots to MUs of multiple service providers (SPs) (i.e., the tenants). Each SP behaves selfishly to maximize the expected long-term payoff from competition with other SPs for the orchestration of channel access opportunities over its MUs, which request both mobile-edge computing and traditional cellular services in the slices. This problem is modelled as a stochastic game, in which the decision makings of a SP depend on the network dynamics as well as the control policies of its competitors. We propose an abstract stochastic game to approximate the Nash equilibrium. The selfish behaviours of a SP can then be characterized by a single-agent Markov decision process (MDP). To simplify decision makings, we linearly decompose the per-SP MDP and derive an online scheme based on deep reinforcement learning to approach the optimal abstract control policies. Numerical experiments show significant performance gains from our scheme.

Smoothed Least-laxity-first Algorithm for EV Charging. We formulate EV charging as a feasibility problem that meets all EVs' energy demands before departure under charging rate constraints and total power constraint. We propose an online algorithm, the smoothed least-laxity-first (sLLF) algorithm, that decides on the current charging rates based on only the information up to the current time. We characterize the performance of the sLLF algorithm analytically and numerically. Numerical experiments with real-world data show that it has significantly higher rate of generating feasible EV charging than several other common EV charging algorithms.

Robust Online Algorithms for Peak-Minimizing EV Charging Under Multistage Uncertainty. In this paper, we study how to utilize forecasts to design online electrical vehicle (EV) charging algorithms that can attain strong performance guarantees. We consider the scenario of an aggregator serving a large number of EVs together with its background load, using both its own renewable energy (for free) and the energy procured from the external grid. The goal of the aggregator is to minimize its peak procurement from the grid, subject to the constraint that each EV has to be fully charged before its deadline. Further, the aggregator can predict the future demand and the renewable energy supply with some levels of uncertainty. We show that such prediction can be very effective in reducing the competitive ratios of online control algorithms, and even allow online algorithms to achieve close-to-offline-optimal peak. Specifically, we first propose a 2-level increasing precision model (2-IPM), to model forecasts with different levels of accuracy. We then develop a powerful computational approach that can compute the optimal competitive ratio under 2-IPM over any online algorithm, and also online algorithms that can achieve the optimal competitive ratio. Simulation results show that, even with up to 20% day-ahead prediction errors, our online algorithms still achieve competitive ratios fairly close to 1, which are much better than the classic results in the literature with a competitive ratio of e. The second contribution of this paper is that we solve a dilemma for online algorithm design, e.g., an online algorithm with good competitive ratio may exhibit poor average-case performance. We propose a new Algorithm-Robustification procedure that can convert an online algorithm with good average-case performance to one with both the optimal competitive ratio and good average-case performance. We demonstrate via trace-based simulations the superior performance of the robustified version of a well-known heuristic algorithm based on model predictive control.

Definition and Evaluation of Model-Free Coordination of Electrical Vehicle Charging With Reinforcement Learning Initial DR studies mainly adopt model predictive control and thus require accurate models of the control problem (e.g., a customer behavior model), which are to a large extent uncertain for the EV scenario. Hence, model-free approaches, especially based on reinforcement learning (RL) are an attractive alternative. In this paper, we propose a new Markov decision process (MDP) formulation in the RL framework, to jointly coordinate a set of EV charging stations. State-of-the-art algorithms either focus on a single EV, or perform the control of an aggregate of EVs in multiple steps (e.g., aggregate load decisions in one step, then a step translating the aggregate decision to individual connected EVs). On the contrary, we propose an RL approach to jointly control the whole set of EVs at once. We contribute a new MDP formulation, with a scalable state representation that is independent of the number of EV charging stations. Further, we use a batch reinforcement learning algorithm, i.e., an instance of fitted Q-iteration, to learn the optimal charging policy. We analyze its performance using simulation experiments based on a real-world EV charging data. More specifically, we (i) explore the various settings in training the RL policy (e.g., duration of the period with training data), (ii) compare its performance to an oracle all-knowing benchmark (which provides an upper bound for performance, relying on information that is not available or at least imperfect in practice), (iii) analyze performance over time, over the course of a full year to evaluate possible performance fluctuations (e.g, across different seasons), and (iv) demonstrate the generalization capacity of a learned control policy to larger sets of charging stations.

ACN-Data - Analysis and Applications of an Open EV Charging Dataset. We are releasing ACN-Data, a dynamic dataset of workplace EV charging which currently includes over 30,000 sessions with more added daily. In this paper we describe the dataset, as well as some interesting user behavior it exhibits. To demonstrate the usefulness of the dataset, we present three examples, learning and predicting user behavior using Gaussian mixture models, optimally sizing on-site solar generation for adaptive electric vehicle charging, and using workplace charging to smooth the net demand Duck Curve.

Hierarchical Electric Vehicle Charging Aggregator Strategy Using Dantzig-Wolfe Decomposition. This article focuses on reducing a charging cost for electric vehicles (EVs). A charging strategy is proposed to minimize the charging cost of EVs within the charging station constraints.

The Sybil Attack Large-scale peer-to-peer systems facesecurity threats from faulty or hostile remotecomputing elements. To resist these threats, manysuch systems employ redundancy. However, if asingle faulty entity can present multiple identities,it can control a substantial fraction of the system,thereby undermining this redundancy. Oneapproach to preventing these &quot;Sybil attacks&quot; is tohave a trusted agency certify identities. Thispaper shows that, without a logically centralizedauthority, Sybil...

Long short-term memory. Learning to store information over extended time intervals by recurrent backpropagation takes a very long time, mostly because of insufficient, decaying error backflow. We briefly review Hochreiter's (1991) analysis of this problem, then address it by introducing a novel, efficient, gradient-based method called long short-term memory (LSTM). Truncating the gradient where this does not do harm, LSTM can learn to bridge minimal time lags in excess of 1000 discrete-time steps by enforcing constant error flow through constant error carousels within special units. Multiplicative gate units learn to open and close access to the constant error flow. LSTM is local in space and time; its computational complexity per time step and weight is O(1). Our experiments with artificial data involve local, distributed, real-valued, and noisy pattern representations. In comparisons with real-time recurrent learning, back propagation through time, recurrent cascade correlation, Elman nets, and neural sequence chunking, LSTM leads to many more successful runs, and learns much faster. LSTM also solves complex, artificial long-time-lag tasks that have never been solved by previous recurrent network algorithms.

Toward Integrating Vehicular Clouds with IoT for Smart City Services Vehicular ad hoc networks, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things are among the emerging technology enablers offering a wide array of new application possibilities in smart urban spaces. These applications consist of smart building automation systems, healthcare monitoring systems, and intelligent and connected transportation, among others. The integration of IoT-based vehicular technologies will enrich services that are eventually going to ignite the proliferation of exciting and even more advanced technological marvels. However, depending on different requirements and design models for networking and architecture, such integration needs the development of newer communication architectures and frameworks. This work proposes a novel framework for architectural and communication design to effectively integrate vehicular networking clouds with IoT, referred to as VCoT, to materialize new applications that provision various IoT services through vehicular clouds. In this article, we particularly put emphasis on smart city applications deployed, operated, and controlled through LoRaWAN-based vehicular networks. LoraWAN, being a new technology, provides efficient and long-range communication possibilities. The article also discusses possible research issues in such an integration including data aggregation, security, privacy, data quality, and network coverage. These issues must be addressed in order to realize the VCoT paradigm deployment, and to provide insights for investors and key stakeholders in VCoT service provisioning. The article presents deep insights for different real-world application scenarios (i.e., smart homes, intelligent traffic light, and smart city) using VCoT for general control and automation along with their associated challenges. It also presents initial insights, through preliminary results, regarding data and resource management in IoT-based resource constrained environments through vehicular clouds.

Distributed multirobot localization In this paper, we present a new approach to the problem of simultaneously localizing a group of mobile robots capable of sensing one another. Each of the robots collects sensor data regarding its own motion and shares this information with the rest of the team during the update cycles. A single estimator, in the form of a Kalman filter, processes the available positioning information from all the members of the team and produces a pose estimate for every one of them. The equations for this centralized estimator can be written in a decentralized form, therefore allowing this single Kalman filter to be decomposed into a number of smaller communicating filters. Each of these filters processes the sensor data collected by its host robot. Exchange of information between the individual filters is necessary only when two robots detect each other and measure their relative pose. The resulting decentralized estimation schema, which we call collective localization, constitutes a unique means for fusing measurements collected from a variety of sensors with minimal communication and processing requirements. The distributed localization algorithm is applied to a group of three robots and the improvement in localization accuracy is presented. Finally, a comparison to the equivalent decentralized information filter is provided.

A simplified dual neural network for quadratic programming with its KWTA application. The design, analysis, and application of a new recurrent neural network for quadratic programming, called simplified dual neural network, are discussed. The analysis mainly concentrates on the convergence property and the computational complexity of the neural network. The simplified dual neural network is shown to be globally convergent to the exact optimal solution. The complexity of the neural network architecture is reduced with the number of neurons equal to the number of inequality constraints. Its application to k-winners-take-all (KWTA) operation is discussed to demonstrate how to solve problems with this neural network.

NETWRAP: An NDN Based Real-TimeWireless Recharging Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks Using vehicles equipped with wireless energy transmission technology to recharge sensor nodes over the air is a game-changer for traditional wireless sensor networks. The recharging policy regarding when to recharge which sensor nodes critically impacts the network performance. So far only a few works have studied such recharging policy for the case of using a single vehicle. In this paper, we propose NETWRAP, an N DN based Real Time Wireless Rech arging Protocol for dynamic wireless recharging in sensor networks. The real-time recharging framework supports single or multiple mobile vehicles. Employing multiple mobile vehicles provides more scalability and robustness. To efficiently deliver sensor energy status information to vehicles in real-time, we leverage concepts and mechanisms from named data networking (NDN) and design energy monitoring and reporting protocols. We derive theoretical results on the energy neutral condition and the minimum number of mobile vehicles required for perpetual network operations. Then we study how to minimize the total traveling cost of vehicles while guaranteeing all the sensor nodes can be recharged before their batteries deplete. We formulate the recharge optimization problem into a Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem with Deadlines (m-TSP with Deadlines), which is NP-hard. To accommodate the dynamic nature of node energy conditions with low overhead, we present an algorithm that selects the node with the minimum weighted sum of traveling time and residual lifetime. Our scheme not only improves network scalability but also ensures the perpetual operation of networks. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed design. The results also validate the correctness of the theoretical analysis and show significant improvements that cut the number of nonfunctional nodes by half compared to the static scheme while maintaining the network overhead at the same level.

Finite-Time Adaptive Fuzzy Tracking Control Design for Nonlinear Systems. This paper addresses the finite-time tracking problem of nonlinear pure-feedback systems. Unlike the literature on traditional finite-time stabilization, in this paper the nonlinear system functions, including the bounding functions, are all totally unknown. Fuzzy logic systems are used to model those unknown functions. To present a finite-time control strategy, a criterion of semiglobal practical...

Convert Harm Into Benefit: A Coordination-Learning Based Dynamic Spectrum Anti-Jamming Approach This paper mainly investigates the multi-user anti-jamming spectrum access problem. Using the idea of “converting harm into benefit,” the malicious jamming signals projected by the enemy are utilized by the users as the coordination signals to guide spectrum coordination. An “internal coordination-external confrontation” multi-user anti-jamming access game model is constructed, and the existence of Nash equilibrium (NE) as well as correlated equilibrium (CE) is demonstrated. A coordination-learning based anti-jamming spectrum access algorithm (CLASA) is designed to achieve the CE of the game. Simulation results show the convergence, and effectiveness of the proposed CLASA algorithm, and indicate that our approach can help users confront the malicious jammer, and coordinate internal spectrum access simultaneously without information exchange. Last but not least, the fairness of the proposed approach under different jamming attack patterns is analyzed, which illustrates that this approach provides fair anti-jamming spectrum access opportunities under complicated jamming pattern.

Parallel distance: A new paradigm of measurement for parallel driving. In this paper, a new paradigm named parallel distance is presented to measure the data information in parallel driving system. As an example, the core variables in the parallel driving system are measured and evaluated in the parallel distance framework. First, the parallel driving 3.0 system included control and management platform, intelligent vehicle platform and remote-control platform is intr...

Generative Adversarial Networks for Parallel Transportation Systems. Generative Adversaria Networks (GANs) have emerged as a promising and effective mechanism for machine learning due to its recent successful applications. GANs share the same idea of producing, testing, acquiring, and utilizing data as well as knowledge based on artificial systems, computational experiments, and parallel execution of actual and virtual scenarios, as outlined in the theory of parall...

Deep Multi-Modal Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation for Autonomous Driving: Datasets, Methods, and Challenges AbstractRecent advancements in perception for autonomous driving are driven by deep learning. In order to achieve robust and accurate scene understanding, autonomous vehicles are usually equipped with different sensors (e.g. cameras, LiDARs, Radars), and multiple sensing modalities can be fused to exploit their complementary properties. In this context, many methods have been proposed for deep multi-modal perception problems. However, there is no general guideline for network architecture design, and questions of “what to fuse”, “when to fuse”, and “how to fuse” remain open. This review paper attempts to systematically summarize methodologies and discuss challenges for deep multi-modal object detection and semantic segmentation in autonomous driving. To this end, we first provide an overview of on-board sensors on test vehicles, open datasets, and background information for object detection and semantic segmentation in autonomous driving research. We then summarize the fusion methodologies and discuss challenges and open questions. In the appendix, we provide tables that summarize topics and methods. We also provide an interactive online platform to navigate each reference: https://boschresearch.github.io/multimodalperception/.

Enhanced Object Detection With Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Advanced Driving Assistance Object detection is a critical problem for advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS). Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNN) achieved large successes on object detection, with performance improvement over traditional approaches, which use hand-engineered features. However, due to the challenging driving environment (e.g., large object scale variation, object occlusion, and bad light conditions), popular CNN detectors do not achieve very good object detection accuracy over the KITTI autonomous driving benchmark dataset. In this paper, we propose three enhancements for CNN-based visual object detection for ADAS. To address the large object scale variation challenge, deconvolution and fusion of CNN feature maps are proposed to add context and deeper features for better object detection at low feature map scales. In addition, soft non-maximal suppression (NMS) is applied across object proposals at different feature scales to address the object occlusion challenge. As the cars and pedestrians have distinct aspect ratio features, we measure their aspect ratio statistics and exploit them to set anchor boxes properly for better object matching and localization. The proposed CNN enhancements are evaluated with various image input sizes by experiments over KITTI dataset. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed enhancements with good detection performance over KITTI test set.

MFR-CNN: Incorporating Multi-Scale Features and Global Information for Traffic Object Detection. Object detection plays an important role in intelligent transportation systems and intelligent vehicles. Although the topic of object detection has been studied for decades, it is still challenging to accurately detect objects under complex scenarios. The contributing factors for challenges include diversified object and background appearance, motion blur, adverse weather conditions, and complex i...

Context-Aware Dynamic Feature Extraction for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds Varying density of point clouds increases the difficulty of 3D detection. In this paper, we present a context-aware dynamic network (CADNet) to capture the variance of density by considering both point context and semantic context. Point-level contexts are generated from original point clouds to enlarge the effective receptive filed. They are extracted around the voxelized pillars based on our extended voxelization method and processed with the context encoder in parallel with the pillar features. With a large perception range, we are able to capture the variance of features for potential objects and generate attentive spatial guidance to help adjust the strengths for different regions. In the region proposal network, considering the limited representation ability of traditional convolution where same kernels are shared among different samples and positions, we propose a decomposable dynamic convolutional layer to adapt to the variance of input features by learning from the local semantic context. It adaptively generates the position-dependent coefficients for multiple fixed kernels and combines them to convolve with local features. Based on our dynamic convolution, we design a dual-path convolution block to further improve the representation ability. We conduct experiments on KITTI dataset and the proposed CADNet has achieved superior performance of 3D detection outperforming SECOND and PointPillars by a large margin at the speed of 30 FPS.

China's 12-Year Quest of Autonomous Vehicular Intelligence: The Intelligent Vehicles Future Challenge Program In this article, we introduce the Intelligent Vehicles Future Challenge of China (IVFC), which has lasted 12 years. Some key features of the tests and a few interesting findings of IVFC are selected and presented. Through the IVFCs held between 2009 and 2020, we gradually established a set of theories, methods, and tools to collect tests? data and efficiently evaluate the performance of autonomous vehicles so that we could learn how to improve both the autonomous vehicles and the testing system itself.

Rich Feature Hierarchies for Accurate Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation Object detection performance, as measured on the canonical PASCAL VOC dataset, has plateaued in the last few years. The best-performing methods are complex ensemble systems that typically combine multiple low-level image features with high-level context. In this paper, we propose a simple and scalable detection algorithm that improves mean average precision (mAP) by more than 30% relative to the previous best result on VOC 2012 -- achieving a mAP of 53.3%. Our approach combines two key insights: (1) one can apply high-capacity convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to bottom-up region proposals in order to localize and segment objects and (2) when labeled training data is scarce, supervised pre-training for an auxiliary task, followed by domain-specific fine-tuning, yields a significant performance boost. Since we combine region proposals with CNNs, we call our method R-CNN: Regions with CNN features. We also present experiments that provide insight into what the network learns, revealing a rich hierarchy of image features. Source code for the complete system is available at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~rbg/rcnn.

A comparative study of texture measures with classification based on featured distributions This paper evaluates the performance both of some texture measures which have been successfully used in various applications and of some new promising approaches proposed recently. For classification a method based on Kullback discrimination of sample and prototype distributions is used. The classification results for single features with one-dimensional feature value distributions and for pairs of complementary features with two-dimensional distributions are presented

Social Perception and Steering for Online Avatars This paper presents work on a new platform for producing realistic group conversation dynamics in shared virtual environments. An avatar, representing users, should perceive the surrounding social environment just as humans would, and use the perceptual information for driving low level reactive behaviors. Unconscious reactions serve as evidence of life, and can also signal social availability and spatial awareness to others. These behaviors get lost when avatar locomotion requires explicit user control. For automating such behaviors we propose a steering layer in the avatars that manages a set of prioritized behaviors executed at different frequencies, which can be activated or deactivated and combined together. This approach gives us enough flexibility to model the group dynamics of social interactions as a set of social norms that activate relevant steering behaviors. A basic set of behaviors is described for conversations, some of which generate a social force field that makes the formation of conversation groups fluidly adapt to external and internal noise, through avatar repositioning and reorientations. The resulting social group behavior appears relatively robust, but perhaps more importantly, it starts to bring a new sense of relevance and continuity to the virtual bodies that often get separated from the ongoing conversation in the chat window.

Node Reclamation and Replacement for Long-Lived Sensor Networks When deployed for long-term tasks, the energy required to support sensor nodes' activities is far more than the energy that can be preloaded in their batteries. No matter how the battery energy is conserved, once the energy is used up, the network life terminates. Therefore, guaranteeing long-term energy supply has persisted as a big challenge. To address this problem, we propose a node reclamation and replacement (NRR) strategy, with which a mobile robot or human labor called mobile repairman (MR) periodically traverses the sensor network, reclaims nodes with low or no power supply, replaces them with fully charged ones, and brings the reclaimed nodes back to an energy station for recharging. To effectively and efficiently realize the strategy, we develop an adaptive rendezvous-based two-tier scheduling scheme (ARTS) to schedule the replacement/reclamation activities of the MR and the duty cycles of nodes. Extensive simulations have been conducted to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the ARTS scheme.

Haptic feedback for enhancing realism of walking simulations. In this paper, we describe several experiments whose goal is to evaluate the role of plantar vibrotactile feedback in enhancing the realism of walking experiences in multimodal virtual environments. To achieve this goal we built an interactive and a noninteractive multimodal feedback system. While during the use of the interactive system subjects physically walked, during the use of the noninteractive system the locomotion was simulated while subjects were sitting on a chair. In both the configurations subjects were exposed to auditory and audio-visual stimuli presented with and without the haptic feedback. Results of the experiments provide a clear preference toward the simulations enhanced with haptic feedback showing that the haptic channel can lead to more realistic experiences in both interactive and noninteractive configurations. The majority of subjects clearly appreciated the added feedback. However, some subjects found the added feedback unpleasant. This might be due, on one hand, to the limits of the haptic simulation and, on the other hand, to the different individual desire to be involved in the simulations. Our findings can be applied to the context of physical navigation in multimodal virtual environments as well as to enhance the user experience of watching a movie or playing a video game.

Vehicular Sensing Networks in a Smart City: Principles, Technologies and Applications. Given the escalating population across the globe, it has become paramount to construct smart cities, aiming for improving the management of urban flows relying on efficient information and communication technologies (ICT). Vehicular sensing networks (VSNs) play a critical role in maintaining the efficient operation of smart cities. Naturally, there are numerous challenges to be solved before the w...

Dual-objective mixed integer linear program and memetic algorithm for an industrial group scheduling problem Group scheduling problems have attracted much attention owing to their many practical applications. This work proposes a new bi-objective serial-batch group scheduling problem considering the constraints of sequence-dependent setup time, release time, and due time. It is originated from an important industrial process, i.e., wire rod and bar rolling process in steel production systems. Two objecti...

BDC-GAN: Bidirectional Conversion Between Computer-Generated and Natural Facial Images for Anti-Forensics Aiming at degrading the capability of the existing forensic methods in discriminating computer generated and natural facial images, a bidirectional conversion between computer-generated and natural facial images based on generative adversarial network (BDC-GAN) is proposed for anti-forensics in this paper. The generator of BDC-GAN is composed of noise encoding and content encoding. In the noise encoding, three high-pass filters are first utilized to extract the sensor pattern noise of the image, and then the stacked convolution layer is combined to continue encoding. In the content encoding, VGG-19 is truncated and fine-tuned to encode the content of the image. Some stacked convolution layers and adaptive instance normalization layer are used in the decoder. The discriminator uses multi-scale image discriminator. Furthermore, content loss and noise loss are well designed, and hyperparameters are reasonably set to accomplish the bidirectional conversion between two domain images meanwhile retaining the original facial contour. Experimental results and analysis demonstrate that the proposed anti-forensic method can achieve better visual quality and stronger deception ability compared with the existing unidirectional CG facial image anti-forensic methods and bidirectional domain adaptive methods, and its effectiveness is verified by the tests on the existing 9 forensic methods. It reveals that the existing forensic techniques can be bypassed by using adversarial learning, and it will eventually push the performance improvement of the discrimination of computer generated and natural facial images.

The Sybil Attack Large-scale peer-to-peer systems facesecurity threats from faulty or hostile remotecomputing elements. To resist these threats, manysuch systems employ redundancy. However, if asingle faulty entity can present multiple identities,it can control a substantial fraction of the system,thereby undermining this redundancy. Oneapproach to preventing these &quot;Sybil attacks&quot; is tohave a trusted agency certify identities. Thispaper shows that, without a logically centralizedauthority, Sybil...

BLEU: a method for automatic evaluation of machine translation Human evaluations of machine translation are extensive but expensive. Human evaluations can take months to finish and involve human labor that can not be reused. We propose a method of automatic machine translation evaluation that is quick, inexpensive, and language-independent, that correlates highly with human evaluation, and that has little marginal cost per run. We present this method as an automated understudy to skilled human judges which substitutes for them when there is need for quick or frequent evaluations.

Computational thinking Summary form only given. My vision for the 21st century, Computational Thinking, will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

Fuzzy logic in control systems: fuzzy logic controller. I.

Switching between stabilizing controllers This paper deals with the problem of switching between several linear time-invariant (LTI) controllers—all of them capable of stabilizing a speci4c LTI process—in such a way that the stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed for any switching sequence. We show that it is possible to 4nd realizations for any given family of controller transfer matrices so that the closed-loop system remains stable, no matter how we switch among the controller. The motivation for this problem is the control of complex systems where con8icting requirements make a single LTI controller unsuitable. ? 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

Tabu Search - Part I

Bidirectional recurrent neural networks In the first part of this paper, a regular recurrent neural network (RNN) is extended to a bidirectional recurrent neural network (BRNN). The BRNN can be trained without the limitation of using input information just up to a preset future frame. This is accomplished by training it simultaneously in positive and negative time direction. Structure and training procedure of the proposed network are explained. In regression and classification experiments on artificial data, the proposed structure gives better results than other approaches. For real data, classification experiments for phonemes from the TIMIT database show the same tendency. In the second part of this paper, it is shown how the proposed bidirectional structure can be easily modified to allow efficient estimation of the conditional posterior probability of complete symbol sequences without making any explicit assumption about the shape of the distribution. For this part, experiments on real data are reported

An intensive survey of fair non-repudiation protocols With the phenomenal growth of the Internet and open networks in general, security services, such as non-repudiation, become crucial to many applications. Non-repudiation services must ensure that when Alice sends some information to Bob over a network, neither Alice nor Bob can deny having participated in a part or the whole of this communication. Therefore a fair non-repudiation protocol has to generate non-repudiation of origin evidences intended to Bob, and non-repudiation of receipt evidences destined to Alice. In this paper, we clearly define the properties a fair non-repudiation protocol must respect, and give a survey of the most important non-repudiation protocols without and with trusted third party (TTP). For the later ones we discuss the evolution of the TTP's involvement and, between others, describe the most recent protocol using a transparent TTP. We also discuss some ad-hoc problems related to the management of non-repudiation evidences.

Dynamic movement and positioning of embodied agents in multiparty conversations For embodied agents to engage in realistic multiparty conversation, they must stand in appropriate places with respect to other agents and the environment. When these factors change, such as an agent joining the conversation, the agents must dynamically move to a new location and/or orientation to accommodate. This paper presents an algorithm for simulating movement of agents based on observed human behavior using techniques developed for pedestrian movement in crowd simulations. We extend a previous group conversation simulation to include an agent motion algorithm. We examine several test cases and show how the simulation generates results that mirror real-life conversation settings.

An improved genetic algorithm with conditional genetic operators and its application to set-covering problem The genetic algorithm (GA) is a popular, biologically inspired optimization method. However, in the GA there is no rule of thumb to design the GA operators and select GA parameters. Instead, trial-and-error has to be applied. In this paper we present an improved genetic algorithm in which crossover and mutation are performed conditionally instead of probability. Because there are no crossover rate and mutation rate to be selected, the proposed improved GA can be more easily applied to a problem than the conventional genetic algorithms. The proposed improved genetic algorithm is applied to solve the set-covering problem. Experimental studies show that the improved GA produces better results over the conventional one and other methods.

Lane-level traffic estimations using microscopic traffic variables This paper proposes a novel inference method to estimate lane-level traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time on road segments where local information could not be measured and assessed directly. The main contributions of the proposed method are 1) the ability to perform lane-level estimations of traffic flow, time occupancy and vehicle inter-arrival time and 2) the ability to adapt to different traffic regimes by assessing only microscopic traffic variables. We propose a modified Kriging estimation model which explicitly takes into account both spatial and temporal variability. Performance evaluations are conducted using real-world data under different traffic regimes and it is shown that the proposed method outperforms a Kalman filter-based approach.

Convolutional Neural Network-Based Classification of Driver's Emotion during Aggressive and Smooth Driving Using Multi-Modal Camera Sensors. Because aggressive driving often causes large-scale loss of life and property, techniques for advance detection of adverse driver emotional states have become important for the prevention of aggressive driving behaviors. Previous studies have primarily focused on systems for detecting aggressive driver emotion via smart-phone accelerometers and gyro-sensors, or they focused on methods of detecting physiological signals using electroencephalography (EEG) or electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors. Because EEG and ECG sensors cause discomfort to drivers and can be detached from the driver's body, it becomes difficult to focus on bio-signals to determine their emotional state. Gyro-sensors and accelerometers depend on the performance of GPS receivers and cannot be used in areas where GPS signals are blocked. Moreover, if driving on a mountain road with many quick turns, a driver's emotional state can easily be misrecognized as that of an aggressive driver. To resolve these problems, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method of detecting emotion to identify aggressive driving using input images of the driver's face, obtained using near-infrared (NIR) light and thermal camera sensors. In this research, we conducted an experiment using our own database, which provides a high classification accuracy for detecting driver emotion leading to either aggressive or smooth (i.e., relaxed) driving. Our proposed method demonstrates better performance than existing methods.

Ethical Considerations Of Applying Robots In Kindergarten Settings: Towards An Approach From A Macroperspective In child-robot interaction (cHRI) research, many studies pursue the goal to develop interactive systems that can be applied in everyday settings. For early education, increasingly, the setting of a kindergarten is targeted. However, when cHRI and research are brought into a kindergarten, a range of ethical and related procedural aspects have to be considered and dealt with. While ethical models elaborated within other human-robot interaction settings, e.g., assisted living contexts, can provide some important indicators for relevant issues, we argue that it is important to start developing a systematic approach to identify and tackle those ethical issues which rise with cHRI in kindergarten settings on a more global level and address the impact of the technology from a macroperspective beyond the effects on the individual. Based on our experience in conducting studies with children in general and pedagogical considerations on the role of the institution of kindergarten in specific, in this paper, we enfold some relevant aspects that have barely been addressed in an explicit way in current cHRI research. Four areas are analyzed and key ethical issues are identified in each area: (1) the institutional setting of a kindergarten, (2) children as a vulnerable group, (3) the caregivers' role, and (4) pedagogical concepts. With our considerations, we aim at (i) broadening the methodology of the current studies within the area of cHRI, (ii) revalidate it based on our comprehensive empirical experience with research in kindergarten settings, both laboratory and real-world contexts, and (iii) provide a framework for the development of a more systematic approach to address the ethical issues in cHRI research within kindergarten settings.

A Novel Cluster Head Selection Technique for Edge-Computing based IoMT Systems •An innovative cluster head selection technique is developed for medical systems.•An energy efficient communication protocol for IoMT applications.•Development of clustering model for remote healthcare domains.

Reliable and Fast Hand-Offs in Low-Power Wireless Networks Hand-off (or hand-over), the process where mobile nodes select the best access point available to transfer data, has been well studied in wireless networks. The performance of a hand-off process depends on the specific characteristics of the wireless links. In the case of low-power wireless networks, hand-off decisions must be carefully taken by considering the unique properties of inexpensive low-power radios. This paper addresses the design, implementation and evaluation of smart-HOP, a hand-off mechanism tailored for low-power wireless networks. This work has three main contributions. First, it formulates the hard hand-off process for low-power networks (such as typical wireless sensor networks - WSNs) with a probabilistic model, to investigate the impact of the most relevant channel parameters through an analytical approach. Second, it confirms the probabilistic model through simulation and further elaborates on the impact of several hand-off parameters. Third, it fine-tunes the most relevant hand-off parameters via an extended set of experiments, in a realistic experimental scenario. The evaluation shows that smart-HOP performs well in the transitional region while achieving more than 98 percent relative delivery ratio and hand-off delays in the order of a few tens of a milliseconds.

An efficient medium access control protocol for WSN-UAV. Recent advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technologies have enhanced Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) by offering a UAV as a mobile data gathering node. These systems are called WSN-UAV that are well-suited for remote monitoring and emergency applications. Since previous Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols proposed in WSNs are not appropriate in the presence of a UAV, few researches have proposed new MAC protocols to meet WSN-UAV requirements. MAC protocols of WSN-UAV should be extremely efficient and fair due to the time-limited presence of the UAV in the neighborhood of each sensor. However, issues such as high throughput in dense networks, fairness among sensors, and efficiency have not been resolved yet in a satisfactory manner. Moreover, previous works lack analytical evaluation of their protocols. In this paper, we present a novel MAC protocol in WSN-UAV, called Advanced Prioritized MAC (AP-MAC), that can provide high throughput, fairness, and efficiency, especially in dense networks. We also analytically evaluate AP-MAC using a 3-dimensional Markov chain and validate its correctness using simulation. Simulation results under various scenarios confirm that AP-MAC can approximately improve throughput and fairness up to 20% and 25%, respectively, leading to higher efficiency compared with previous work in WSN-UAV systems such as Prioritized Frame Selection (PFS).

Wireless Powered Sensor Networks for Internet of Things: Maximum Throughput and Optimal Power Allocation. This paper investigates a wireless powered sensor network, where multiple sensor nodes are deployed to monitor a certain external environment. A multiantenna power station (PS) provides the power to these sensor nodes during wireless energy transfer phase, and consequently the sensor nodes employ the harvested energy to transmit their own monitoring information to a fusion center during wireless i...

A Compressive Sensing-Based Approach to End-to-End Network Traffic Reconstruction. Estimation of end-to-end network traffic plays an important role in traffic engineering and network planning. The direct measurement of a network&#39;s traffic matrix consumes large amounts of network resources and is thus impractical in most cases. How to accurately construct traffic matrix remains a great challenge. This paper studies end-to-end network traffic reconstruction in large-scale networks...

An Energy-Efficient Evolutionary Clustering Technique for Disaster Management in IoT Networks. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are key elements of Internet of Things (IoT) networks which provide sensing and wireless connectivity. Disaster management in smart cities is classified as a safety-critical application. Thus, it is important to ensure system availability by increasing the lifetime of WSNs. Clustering is one of the routing techniques that benefits energy efficiency in WSNs. This paper provides an evolutionary clustering and routing method which is capable of managing the energy consumption of nodes while considering the characteristics of a disaster area. The proposed method consists of two phases. First, we present a model with improved hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) for cluster head (CH) selection. Second, we design a PSO-based multi-hop routing system with enhanced tree encoding and a modified data packet format. The simulation results for disaster scenarios prove the efficiency of the proposed method in comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the overall residual energy, number of live nodes, network coverage, and the packet delivery ratio.

Wireless sensor network survey A wireless sensor network (WSN) has important applications such as remote environmental monitoring and target tracking. This has been enabled by the availability, particularly in recent years, of sensors that are smaller, cheaper, and intelligent. These sensors are equipped with wireless interfaces with which they can communicate with one another to form a network. The design of a WSN depends significantly on the application, and it must consider factors such as the environment, the application's design objectives, cost, hardware, and system constraints. The goal of our survey is to present a comprehensive review of the recent literature since the publication of [I.F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam, E. Cayirci, A survey on sensor networks, IEEE Communications Magazine, 2002]. Following a top-down approach, we give an overview of several new applications and then review the literature on various aspects of WSNs. We classify the problems into three different categories: (1) internal platform and underlying operating system, (2) communication protocol stack, and (3) network services, provisioning, and deployment. We review the major development in these three categories and outline new challenges.

Long short-term memory. Learning to store information over extended time intervals by recurrent backpropagation takes a very long time, mostly because of insufficient, decaying error backflow. We briefly review Hochreiter's (1991) analysis of this problem, then address it by introducing a novel, efficient, gradient-based method called long short-term memory (LSTM). Truncating the gradient where this does not do harm, LSTM can learn to bridge minimal time lags in excess of 1000 discrete-time steps by enforcing constant error flow through constant error carousels within special units. Multiplicative gate units learn to open and close access to the constant error flow. LSTM is local in space and time; its computational complexity per time step and weight is O(1). Our experiments with artificial data involve local, distributed, real-valued, and noisy pattern representations. In comparisons with real-time recurrent learning, back propagation through time, recurrent cascade correlation, Elman nets, and neural sequence chunking, LSTM leads to many more successful runs, and learns much faster. LSTM also solves complex, artificial long-time-lag tasks that have never been solved by previous recurrent network algorithms.

Joint Task Offloading and Resource Allocation for Multi-Server Mobile-Edge Computing Networks Mobile-edge computing (MEC) is an emerging paradigm that provides a capillary distribution of cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the wireless access network, enabling rich services and applications in close proximity to the end users. In this paper, an MEC enabled multi-cell wireless network is considered where each base station (BS) is equipped with a MEC server that assists mobile users...

Space-time modeling of traffic flow. This paper discusses the application of space-time autoregressive integrated moving average (STARIMA) methodology for representing traffic flow patterns. Traffic flow data are in the form of spatial time series and are collected at specific locations at constant intervals of time. Important spatial characteristics of the space-time process are incorporated in the STARIMA model through the use of weighting matrices estimated on the basis of the distances among the various locations where data are collected. These matrices distinguish the space-time approach from the vector autoregressive moving average (VARMA) methodology and enable the model builders to control the number of the parameters that have to be estimated. The proposed models can be used for short-term forecasting of space-time stationary traffic-flow processes and for assessing the impact of traffic-flow changes on other parts of the network. The three-stage iterative space-time model building procedure is illustrated using 7.5min average traffic flow data for a set of 25 loop-detectors located at roads that direct to the centre of the city of Athens, Greece. Data for two months with different traffic-flow characteristics are modelled in order to determine the stability of the parameter estimation.

Dynamic transfer among alternative controllers and its relation to antiwindup controller design Advanced control strategies and modern consulting provide new challenges for the classical problem of bumpless transfer. It can, for example, be necessary to transfer between an only approximately known existing analog controller and a new digital or adaptive controller without accessing any states. Transfer ought to be bidirectional and not presuppose steady state, so that an immediate back-transfer is possible if the new controller should drive the plant unstable. We present a scheme that meets these requirements. By casting the problem of bidirectional transfer into an associated tracking control problem, systematic analysis and design procedures from control theory can be applied. The associated control problem also has a correspondence to the design of antiwindup controllers. The paper includes laboratory and industrial applications.

NETWRAP: An NDN Based Real-TimeWireless Recharging Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks Using vehicles equipped with wireless energy transmission technology to recharge sensor nodes over the air is a game-changer for traditional wireless sensor networks. The recharging policy regarding when to recharge which sensor nodes critically impacts the network performance. So far only a few works have studied such recharging policy for the case of using a single vehicle. In this paper, we propose NETWRAP, an N DN based Real Time Wireless Rech arging Protocol for dynamic wireless recharging in sensor networks. The real-time recharging framework supports single or multiple mobile vehicles. Employing multiple mobile vehicles provides more scalability and robustness. To efficiently deliver sensor energy status information to vehicles in real-time, we leverage concepts and mechanisms from named data networking (NDN) and design energy monitoring and reporting protocols. We derive theoretical results on the energy neutral condition and the minimum number of mobile vehicles required for perpetual network operations. Then we study how to minimize the total traveling cost of vehicles while guaranteeing all the sensor nodes can be recharged before their batteries deplete. We formulate the recharge optimization problem into a Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem with Deadlines (m-TSP with Deadlines), which is NP-hard. To accommodate the dynamic nature of node energy conditions with low overhead, we present an algorithm that selects the node with the minimum weighted sum of traveling time and residual lifetime. Our scheme not only improves network scalability but also ensures the perpetual operation of networks. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed design. The results also validate the correctness of the theoretical analysis and show significant improvements that cut the number of nonfunctional nodes by half compared to the static scheme while maintaining the network overhead at the same level.

Adaptive Fuzzy Control With Prescribed Performance for Block-Triangular-Structured Nonlinear Systems. In this paper, an adaptive fuzzy control method with prescribed performance is proposed for multi-input and multioutput block-triangular-structured nonlinear systems with immeasurable states. Fuzzy logic systems are adopted to identify the unknown nonlinear system functions. Adaptive fuzzy state observers are designed to solve the problem of unmeasured states, and a new observer-based output-feedb...

Energy harvesting algorithm considering max flow problem in wireless sensor networks. In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), sensor nodes with poor energy always have bad effect on the data rate or max flow. These nodes are called bottleneck nodes. In this paper, in order to increase the max flow, we assume an energy harvesting WSNs environment to investigate the cooperation of multiple Mobile Chargers (MCs). MCs are mobile robots that use wireless charging technology to charge sensor nodes in WSNs. This means that in energy harvesting WSNs environments, sensor nodes can obtain energy replenishment by using MCs or collecting energy from nature by themselves. In our research, we use MCs to improve the energy of the sensor nodes by performing multiple rounds of unified scheduling, and finally achieve the purpose of increasing the max flow at sinks. Firstly, we model this problem as a Linear Programming (LP) to search the max flow in a round of charging scheduling and prove that the problem is NP-hard. In order to solve the problem, we propose a heuristic approach: deploying MCs in units of paths with the lowest energy node priority. To reduce the energy consumption of MCs and increase the charging efficiency, we also take the optimization of MCs’ moving distance into our consideration. Finally, we extend the method to multiple rounds of scheduling called BottleNeck. Simulation results show that Bottleneck performs well at increasing max flow.

From Proxemics Theory to Socially-Aware Navigation: A Survey. In the context of a growing interest in modelling human behavior to increase the robots’ social abilities, this article presents a survey related to socially-aware robot navigation. It presents a review from sociological concepts to social robotics and human-aware navigation. Social cues, signals and proxemics are discussed. Socially aware behavior in terms of navigation is tackled also. Finally, recent robotic experiments focusing on the way social conventions and robotics must be linked is presented.

Recommendation Effects of a Social Robot for Advertisement-Use Context in a Shopping Mall. We developed a coupon-giving robot system for a shopping mall to explore possible applications using social robots in daily environments, particularly for advertising. The system provided information through conversations with people. The robot was semi-autonomous, which means that it was partly controlled by a human operator, to cope with the difficulty of speech recognition in real environments. We conducted two field trials to investigate two kinds of effectiveness related to recommendations: the presence of a robot and different conversation schemas. Although a robot can strongly attract people with its presence and interaction, it remains unknown whether it can increase the effects of advertisements in real environments. Our field trial results show that a small robot increased the number of people who printed coupons more than a normal-sized robot. The number of people who printed coupons also increased when the robot asked visitors to freely select from all coupon candidates or to listen to its recommendation.

Spatial augmented reality as a method for a mobile robot to communicate intended movement. •Communication strategies are to allow robots to convey upcoming movements to humans.•Arrows for conveying direction of movement are understood by humans.•Simple maps depicting a sequence of upcoming movements are useful to humans.•Robots projecting arrows and a map can effectively communicate upcoming movement.

Human Mobility Modeling for Robot-Assisted Evacuation in Complex Indoor Environments. A large number of injuries or deaths may occur when an emergency happens in a crowded public place. The congestion at exits may slow down the egress rate due to the effect of “faster-is-slower”. This inspires us to study how human behavior dynamically changes over time at an emergency in a complex indoor environment. In this paper, we refer the panic of evacuees to their perception of the threat a...

Human-Like Guide Robot that Proactively Explains Exhibits We developed an autonomous human-like guide robot for a science museum. Its identifies individuals, estimates the exhibits at which visitors are looking, and proactively approaches them to provide explanations with gaze autonomously, using our new approach called speak-and-retreat interaction. The robot also performs such relation-building behaviors as greeting visitors by their names and expressing a friendlier attitude to repeat visitors. We conducted a field study in a science museum at which our system basically operated autonomously and the visitors responded quite positively. First-time visitors on average interacted with the robot for about 9 min, and 94.74% expressed a desire to interact with it again in the future. Repeat visitors noticed its relation-building capability and perceived a closer relationship with it.

Computational thinking Summary form only given. My vision for the 21st century, Computational Thinking, will be a fundamental skill used by everyone in the world. To reading, writing, and arithmetic, we should add computational thinking to every child's analytical ability. Computational thinking involves solving problems, designing systems, and understanding human behavior by drawing on the concepts fundamental to computer science. Thinking like a computer scientist means more than being able to program a computer. It requires the ability to abstract and thus to think at multiple levels of abstraction. In this talk I will give many examples of computational thinking, argue that it has already influenced other disciplines, and promote the idea that teaching computational thinking can not only inspire future generations to enter the field of computer science but benefit people in all fields.

JPEG Error Analysis and Its Applications to Digital Image Forensics JPEG is one of the most extensively used image formats. Understanding the inherent characteristics of JPEG may play a useful role in digital image forensics. In this paper, we introduce JPEG error analysis to the study of image forensics. The main errors of JPEG include quantization, rounding, and truncation errors. Through theoretically analyzing the effects of these errors on single and double JPEG compression, we have developed three novel schemes for image forensics including identifying whether a bitmap image has previously been JPEG compressed, estimating the quantization steps of a JPEG image, and detecting the quantization table of a JPEG image. Extensive experimental results show that our new methods significantly outperform existing techniques especially for the images of small sizes. We also show that the new method can reliably detect JPEG image blocks which are as small as 8 × 8 pixels and compressed with quality factors as high as 98. This performance is important for analyzing and locating small tampered regions within a composite image.

Highly dynamic Destination-Sequenced Distance-Vector routing (DSDV) for mobile computers An ad-hoc network is the cooperative engagement of a collection of Mobile Hosts without the required intervention of any centralized Access Point. In this paper we present an innovative design for the operation of such ad-hoc networks. The basic idea of the design is to operate each Mobile Host as a specialized router, which periodically advertises its view of the interconnection topology with other Mobile Hosts within the network. This amounts to a new sort of routing protocol. We have investigated modifications to the basic Bellman-Ford routing mechanisms, as specified by RIP [5], to make it suitable for a dynamic and self-starting network mechanism as is required by users wishing to utilize ad hoc networks. Our modifications address some of the previous objections to the use of Bellman-Ford, related to the poor looping properties of such algorithms in the face of broken links and the resulting time dependent nature of the interconnection topology describing the links between the Mobile Hosts. Finally, we describe the ways in which the basic network-layer routing can be modified to provide MAC-layer support for ad-hoc networks.

The FERET Evaluation Methodology for Face-Recognition Algorithms Two of the most critical requirements in support of producing reliable face-recognition systems are a large database of facial images and a testing procedure to evaluate systems. The Face Recognition Technology (FERET) program has addressed both issues through the FERET database of facial images and the establishment of the FERET tests. To date, 14,126 images from 1,199 individuals are included in the FERET database, which is divided into development and sequestered portions of the database. In September 1996, the FERET program administered the third in a series of FERET face-recognition tests. The primary objectives of the third test were to 1) assess the state of the art, 2) identify future areas of research, and 3) measure algorithm performance.

Communication in reactive multiagent robotic systems Multiple cooperating robots are able to complete many tasks more quickly and reliably than one robot alone. Communication between the robots can multiply their capabilities and effectiveness, but to what extent? In this research, the importance of communication in robotic societies is investigated through experiments on both simulated and real robots. Performance was measured for three different types of communication for three different tasks. The levels of communication are progressively more complex and potentially more expensive to implement. For some tasks, communication can significantly improve performance, but for others inter-agent communication is apparently unnecessary. In cases where communication helps, the lowest level of communication is almost as effective as the more complex type. The bulk of these results are derived from thousands of simulations run with randomly generated initial conditions. The simulation results help determine appropriate parameters for the reactive control system which was ported for tests on Denning mobile robots.

Lower Extremity Exoskeletons and Active Orthoses: Challenges and State-of-the-Art In the nearly six decades since researchers began to explore methods of creating them, exoskeletons have progressed from the stuff of science fiction to nearly commercialized products. While there are still many challenges associated with exoskeleton development that have yet to be perfected, the advances in the field have been enormous. In this paper, we review the history and discuss the state-of-the-art of lower limb exoskeletons and active orthoses. We provide a design overview of hardware, actuation, sensory, and control systems for most of the devices that have been described in the literature, and end with a discussion of the major advances that have been made and hurdles yet to be overcome.

A Model Predictive Control Approach to Microgrid Operation Optimization. Microgrids are subsystems of the distribution grid, which comprises generation capacities, storage devices, and controllable loads, operating as a single controllable system either connected or isolated from the utility grid. In this paper, we present a study on applying a model predictive control approach to the problem of efficiently optimizing microgrid operations while satisfying a time-varying request and operation constraints. The overall problem is formulated using mixed-integer linear programming (MILP), which can be solved in an efficient way by using commercial solvers without resorting to complex heuristics or decompositions techniques. Then, the MILP formulation leads to significant improvements in solution quality and computational burden. A case study of a microgrid is employed to assess the performance of the online optimization-based control strategy and the simulation results are discussed. The method is applied to an experimental microgrid located in Athens, Greece. The experimental results show the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Convolutional Neural Network-Based Classification of Driver's Emotion during Aggressive and Smooth Driving Using Multi-Modal Camera Sensors. Because aggressive driving often causes large-scale loss of life and property, techniques for advance detection of adverse driver emotional states have become important for the prevention of aggressive driving behaviors. Previous studies have primarily focused on systems for detecting aggressive driver emotion via smart-phone accelerometers and gyro-sensors, or they focused on methods of detecting physiological signals using electroencephalography (EEG) or electrocardiogram (ECG) sensors. Because EEG and ECG sensors cause discomfort to drivers and can be detached from the driver's body, it becomes difficult to focus on bio-signals to determine their emotional state. Gyro-sensors and accelerometers depend on the performance of GPS receivers and cannot be used in areas where GPS signals are blocked. Moreover, if driving on a mountain road with many quick turns, a driver's emotional state can easily be misrecognized as that of an aggressive driver. To resolve these problems, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based method of detecting emotion to identify aggressive driving using input images of the driver's face, obtained using near-infrared (NIR) light and thermal camera sensors. In this research, we conducted an experiment using our own database, which provides a high classification accuracy for detecting driver emotion leading to either aggressive or smooth (i.e., relaxed) driving. Our proposed method demonstrates better performance than existing methods.

Ethical Considerations Of Applying Robots In Kindergarten Settings: Towards An Approach From A Macroperspective In child-robot interaction (cHRI) research, many studies pursue the goal to develop interactive systems that can be applied in everyday settings. For early education, increasingly, the setting of a kindergarten is targeted. However, when cHRI and research are brought into a kindergarten, a range of ethical and related procedural aspects have to be considered and dealt with. While ethical models elaborated within other human-robot interaction settings, e.g., assisted living contexts, can provide some important indicators for relevant issues, we argue that it is important to start developing a systematic approach to identify and tackle those ethical issues which rise with cHRI in kindergarten settings on a more global level and address the impact of the technology from a macroperspective beyond the effects on the individual. Based on our experience in conducting studies with children in general and pedagogical considerations on the role of the institution of kindergarten in specific, in this paper, we enfold some relevant aspects that have barely been addressed in an explicit way in current cHRI research. Four areas are analyzed and key ethical issues are identified in each area: (1) the institutional setting of a kindergarten, (2) children as a vulnerable group, (3) the caregivers' role, and (4) pedagogical concepts. With our considerations, we aim at (i) broadening the methodology of the current studies within the area of cHRI, (ii) revalidate it based on our comprehensive empirical experience with research in kindergarten settings, both laboratory and real-world contexts, and (iii) provide a framework for the development of a more systematic approach to address the ethical issues in cHRI research within kindergarten settings.

Towards an Ontology for Scenario Definition for the Assessment of Automated Vehicles: An Object-Oriented Framework The development of new assessment methods for the performance of automated vehicles is essential to enable the deployment of automated driving technologies, due to the complex operational domain of automated vehicles. One contributing method is scenario-based assessment in which test cases are derived from real-world road traffic scenarios obtained from driving data. Given the complexity of the reality that is being modeled in these scenarios, it is a challenge to define a structure for capturing these scenarios. An intensional definition that provides a set of characteristics that are deemed to be both necessary and sufficient to qualify as a scenario assures that the scenarios constructed are both complete and intercomparable. In this article, we develop a comprehensive and operable definition of the notion of scenario while considering existing definitions in the literature. This is achieved by proposing an object-oriented framework in which scenarios and their building blocks are defined as classes of objects having attributes, methods, and relationships with other objects. The object-oriented approach promotes clarity, modularity, reusability, and encapsulation of the objects. We provide definitions and justifications of each of the terms. Furthermore, the framework is used to translate the terms in a coding language that is publicly available.

Using Ontology-Based Traffic Models for More Efficient Decision Making of Autonomous Vehicles The paper describes how a high-level abstract world model can be used to support the decision-making process of an autonomous driving system. The approach uses a hierarchical world model and distinguishes between a low-level model for the trajectory planning and a high-level model for solving the traffic coordination problem. The abstract world model used in the CyberCars-2 project is presented. It is based on a topological lane segmentation and introduces relations to represent the semantic context of the traffic scenario. This makes it much easier to realize a consistent and complete driving control system, and to analyze, evaluate and simulate such a system.

Ontology-based methods for enhancing autonomous vehicle path planning We report the results of a first implementation demonstrating the use of an ontology to support reasoning about obstacles to improve the capabilities and performance of on-board route planning for autonomous vehicles. This is part of an overall effort to evaluate the performance of ontologies in different components of an autonomous vehicle within the 4D/RCS system architecture developed at NIST. Our initial focus has been on simple roadway driving scenarios where the controlled vehicle encounters potential obstacles in its path. As reported elsewhere [C. Schlenoff, S. Balakirsky, M. Uschold, R. Provine, S. Smith, Using ontologies to aid navigation planning in autonomous vehicles, Knowledge Engineering Review 18 (3) (2004) 243–255], our approach is to develop an ontology of objects in the environment, in conjunction with rules for estimating the damage that would be incurred by collisions with different objects in different situations. Automated reasoning is used to estimate collision damage; this information is fed to the route planner to help it decide whether to plan to avoid the object. We describe the results of the first implementation that integrates the ontology, the reasoner and the planner. We describe our insights and lessons learned and discuss resulting changes to our approach.

Online Verification of Automated Road Vehicles Using Reachability Analysis An approach for formally verifying the safety of automated vehicles is proposed. Due to the uniqueness of each traffic situation, we verify safety online, i.e., during the operation of the vehicle. The verification is performed by predicting the set of all possible occupancies of the automated vehicle and other traffic participants on the road. In order to capture all possible future scenarios, we apply reachability analysis to consider all possible behaviors of mathematical models considering uncertain inputs (e.g., sensor noise, disturbances) and partially unknown initial states. Safety is guaranteed with respect to the modeled uncertainties and behaviors if the occupancy of the automated vehicle does not intersect that of other traffic participants for all times. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated by test drives with an automated vehicle at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

AVFI: Fault Injection for Autonomous Vehicles Autonomous vehicle (AV) technology is rapidly becoming a reality on U.S. roads, offering the promise of improvements in traffic management, safety, and the comfort and efficiency of vehicular travel. With this increasing popularity and ubiquitous deployment, resilience has become a critical requirement for public acceptance and adoption. Recent studies into the resilience of AVs have shown that though the AV systems are improving over time, they have not reached human levels of automation. Prior work in this area has studied the safety and resilience of individual components of the AV system (e.g., testing of neural networks powering the perception function). However, methods for holistic end-to-end resilience assessment of AV systems are still non-existent.

Specifying Safety of Autonomous Vehicles in Signal Temporal Logic We develop a set of contracts for autonomous control software that ensures that if all traffic participants follow the contracts, the overall traffic system will be collision-free. We express our contracts in Signal Temporal Logic (STL), a lightweight specification language that enables V &V methodologies. We demonstrate how the specification can be used for evaluation of the performance of autonomy software, and We provide preliminary evidence that our contracts are not excessively conservative, i.e., they are not more restrictive than existing guidelines for safe driving by humans.

Acclimatizing the Operational Design Domain for Autonomous Driving Systems The operational design domain (ODD) of an automated driving system (ADS) can be used to confine the environmental scope of where the ADS is safe to execute. ODD acclimatization is one of the necessary steps for validating vehicle safety in complex traffic environments. This article proposes an approach and architectural design to extract and enhance the ODD of the ADS based on the task scenario an...

Accelerated Evaluation of Automated Vehicles Safety in Lane-Change Scenarios Based on Importance Sampling Techniques Automated vehicles (AVs) must be thoroughly evaluated before their release and deployment. A widely used evaluation approach is the Naturalistic-Field Operational Test (N-FOT), which tests prototype vehicles directly on the public roads. Due to the low exposure to safety-critical scenarios, N-FOTs are time consuming and expensive to conduct. In this paper, we propose an accelerated evaluation approach for AVs. The results can be used to generate motions of the other primary vehicles to accelerate the verification of AVs in simulations and controlled experiments. Frontal collision due to unsafe cut-ins is the target crash type of this paper. Human-controlled vehicles making unsafe lane changes are modeled as the primary disturbance to AVs based on data collected by the University of Michigan Safety Pilot Model Deployment Program. The cut-in scenarios are generated based on skewed statistics of collected human driver behaviors, which generate risky testing scenarios while preserving the statistical information so that the safety benefits of AVs in nonaccelerated cases can be accurately estimated. The cross-entropy method is used to recursively search for the optimal skewing parameters. The frequencies of the occurrences of conflicts, crashes, and injuries are estimated for a modeled AV, and the achieved accelerated rate is around 2000 to 20 000. In other words, in the accelerated simulations, driving for 1000 miles will expose the AV with challenging scenarios that will take about 2 to 20 million miles of real-world driving to encounter. This technique thus has the potential to greatly reduce the development and validation time for AVs.

A survey of socially interactive robots This paper reviews “socially interactive robots”: robots for which social human–robot interaction is important. We begin by discussing the context for socially interactive robots, emphasizing the relationship to other research fields and the different forms of “social robots”. We then present a taxonomy of design methods and system components used to build socially interactive robots. Finally, we describe the impact of these robots on humans and discuss open issues. An expanded version of this paper, which contains a survey and taxonomy of current applications, is available as a technical report [T. Fong, I. Nourbakhsh, K. Dautenhahn, A survey of socially interactive robots: concepts, design and applications, Technical Report No. CMU-RI-TR-02-29, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, 2002].

A General Equilibrium Model for Industries with Price and Service Competition This paper develops a stochastic general equilibrium inventory model for an oligopoly, in which all inventory constraint parameters are endogenously determined. We propose several systems of demand processes whose distributions are functions of all retailers' prices and all retailers' service levels. We proceed with the investigation of the equilibrium behavior of infinite-horizon models for industries facing this type of generalized competition, under demand uncertainty.We systematically consider the following three competition scenarios. (1) Price competition only: Here, we assume that the firms' service levels are exogenously chosen, but characterize how the price and inventory strategy equilibrium vary with the chosen service levels. (2) Simultaneous price and service-level competition: Here, each of the firms simultaneously chooses a service level and a combined price and inventory strategy. (3) Two-stage competition: The firms make their competitive choices sequentially. In a first stage, all firms simultaneously choose a service level; in a second stage, the firms simultaneously choose a combined pricing and inventory strategy with full knowledge of the service levels selected by all competitors. We show that in all of the above settings a Nash equilibrium of infinite-horizon stationary strategies exists and that it is of a simple structure, provided a Nash equilibrium exists in a so-called reduced game.We pay particular attention to the question of whether a firm can choose its service level on the basis of its own (input) characteristics (i.e., its cost parameters and demand function) only. We also investigate under which of the demand models a firm, under simultaneous competition, responds to a change in the exogenously specified characteristics of the various competitors by either: (i) adjusting its service level and price in the same direction, thereby compensating for price increases (decreases) by offering improved (inferior) service, or (ii) adjusting them in opposite directions, thereby simultaneously offering better or worse prices and service.

Load Scheduling and Dispatch for Aggregators of Plug-In Electric Vehicles This paper proposes an operating framework for aggregators of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). First, a minimum-cost load scheduling algorithm is designed, which determines the purchase of energy in the day-ahead market based on the forecast electricity price and PEV power demands. The same algorithm is applicable for negotiating bilateral contracts. Second, a dynamic dispatch algorithm is developed, used for distributing the purchased energy to PEVs on the operating day. Simulation results are used to evaluate the proposed algorithms, and to demonstrate the potential impact of an aggregated PEV fleet on the power system.

An Efficient Non-Negative Matrix-Factorization-Based Approach to Collaborative Filtering for Recommender Systems Matrix-factorization (MF)-based approaches prove to be highly accurate and scalable in addressing collaborative filtering (CF) problems. During the MF process, the non-negativity, which ensures good representativeness of the learnt model, is critically important. However, current non-negative MF (NMF) models are mostly designed for problems in computer vision, while CF problems differ from them due to their extreme sparsity of the target rating-matrix. Currently available NMF-based CF models are based on matrix manipulation and lack practicability for industrial use. In this work, we focus on developing an NMF-based CF model with a single-element-based approach. The idea is to investigate the non-negative update process depending on each involved feature rather than on the whole feature matrices. With the non-negative single-element-based update rules, we subsequently integrate the Tikhonov regularizing terms, and propose the regularized single-element-based NMF (RSNMF) model. RSNMF is especially suitable for solving CF problems subject to the constraint of non-negativity. The experiments on large industrial datasets show high accuracy and low-computational complexity achieved by RSNMF.

Driver Gaze Zone Estimation Using Convolutional Neural Networks: A General Framework and Ablative Analysis Driver gaze has been shown to be an excellent surrogate for driver attention in intelligent vehicles. With the recent surge of highly autonomous vehicles, driver gaze can be useful for determining the handoff time to a human driver. While there has been significant improvement in personalized driver gaze zone estimation systems, a generalized system which is invariant to different subjects, perspe...

Dual-objective mixed integer linear program and memetic algorithm for an industrial group scheduling problem Group scheduling problems have attracted much attention owing to their many practical applications. This work proposes a new bi-objective serial-batch group scheduling problem considering the constraints of sequence-dependent setup time, release time, and due time. It is originated from an important industrial process, i.e., wire rod and bar rolling process in steel production systems. Two objecti...

Perceptual image hashing via dual-cross pattern encoding and salient structure detection. •A robust image hashing scheme based on texture and structure features is proposed.•Textural features are extracted from DCP-coded maps through histogram composition.•Structural features are extracted from sampled blocks with the richest corner points.•Final hash can be acquired after data compression for texture-structure features.•Our scheme has better performances of robustness and discrimination simultaneously.

Forensics of image blurring and sharpening history based on NSCT domain Detection of multi-manipulated image has always been a more realistic direction for digital image forensic technologies, which extremely attracts interests of researchers. However, mutual affects of manipulations make it difficult to identify the process using existing single-manipulated detection methods. In this paper, a novel algorithm for detecting image manipulation history of blurring and sharpening is proposed based on non-subsampled contourlet transform (NSCT) domain. Two main sets of features are extracted from the NSCT domain: extremum feature and local directional similarity vector. Extremum feature includes multiple maximums and minimums of NSCT coefficients through every scale. Under the influence of blurring or sharpening manipulation, the extremum feature tends to gain ideal discrimination. Directional similarity feature represents the correlation of a pixel and its neighbors, which can also be altered by blurring or sharpening. For one pixel, the directional vector is composed of the coefficients from every directional subband at a certain scale. Local directional similarity vector is obtained through similarity calculation between the directional vector of one random selected pixel and the directional vectors of its 8-neighborhood pixels. With the proposed features, we are able to detect two particular operations and determine the processing order at the same time. Experiment results manifest that the proposed algorithm is effective and accurate.

Scalable Processing History Detector for JPEG Images.

Non-uniform Watermark Sharing Based on Optimal Iterative BTC for Image Tampering Recovery. Self-embedding watermarking can be used for image tampering recovery. In this work, the authors proposed a new image self-embedding scheme based on optimal iterative block truncation coding and non-uniform watermark sharing. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve better performance of tampering recovery than some of state-of-the-art schemes.

Robust Median Filtering Forensics Using an Autoregressive Model In order to verify the authenticity of digital images, researchers have begun developing digital forensic techniques to identify image editing. One editing operation that has recently received increased attention is median filtering. While several median filtering detection techniques have recently been developed, their performance is degraded by JPEG compression. These techniques suffer similar degradations in performance when a small window of the image is analyzed, as is done in localized filtering or cut-and-paste detection, rather than the image as a whole. In this paper, we propose a new, robust median filtering forensic technique. It operates by analyzing the statistical properties of the median filter residual (MFR), which we define as the difference between an image in question and a median filtered version of itself. To capture the statistical properties of the MFR, we fit it to an autoregressive (AR) model. We then use the AR coefficients as features for median filter detection. We test the effectiveness of our proposed median filter detection techniques through a series of experiments. These results show that our proposed forensic technique can achieve important performance gains over existing methods, particularly at low false-positive rates, with a very small dimension of features.

Energy-based Generative Adversarial Network. We introduce the Energy-based Generative Adversarial Network model (EBGAN) which views the discriminator as an energy function that attributes low energies to the regions near the data manifold and higher energies to other regions. Similar to the probabilistic GANs, a generator is seen as being trained to produce contrastive samples with minimal energies, while the discriminator is trained to assign high energies to these generated samples. Viewing the discriminator as an energy function allows to use a wide variety of architectures and loss functionals in addition to the usual binary classifier with logistic output. Among them, we show one instantiation of EBGAN framework as using an auto-encoder architecture, with the energy being the reconstruction error, in place of the discriminator. We show that this form of EBGAN exhibits more stable behavior than regular GANs during training. We also show that a single-scale architecture can be trained to generate high-resolution images.

Image Forgery Localization via Block-Grained Analysis of JPEG Artifacts In this paper, we propose a forensic algorithm to discriminate between original and forged regions in JPEG images, under the hypothesis that the tampered image presents a double JPEG compression, either aligned (A-DJPG) or nonaligned (NA-DJPG). Unlike previous approaches, the proposed algorithm does not need to manually select a suspect region in order to test the presence or the absence of double compression artifacts. Based on an improved and unified statistical model characterizing the artifacts that appear in the presence of both A-DJPG or NA-DJPG, the proposed algorithm automatically computes a likelihood map indicating the probability for each 8 $\times$ 8 discrete cosine transform block of being doubly compressed. The validity of the proposed approach has been assessed by evaluating the performance of a detector based on thresholding the likelihood map, considering different forensic scenarios. The effectiveness of the proposed method is also confirmed by tests carried on realistic tampered images. An interesting property of the proposed Bayesian approach is that it can be easily extended to work with traces left by other kinds of processing.

On the security of public key protocols Recently the use of public key encryption to provide secure network communication has received considerable attention. Such public key systems are usually effective against passive eavesdroppers, who merely tap the lines and try to decipher the message. It has been pointed out, however, that an improperly designed protocol could be vulnerable to an active saboteur, one who may impersonate another user or alter the message being transmitted. Several models are formulated in which the security of protocols can be discussed precisely. Algorithms and characterizations that can be used to determine protocol security in these models are given.

Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation for Mobile-Edge Computation Offloading. Mobile-edge computation offloading (MECO) off-loads intensive mobile computation to clouds located at the edges of cellular networks. Thereby, MECO is envisioned as a promising technique for prolonging the battery lives and enhancing the computation capacities of mobiles. In this paper, we study resource allocation for a multiuser MECO system based on time-division multiple access (TDMA) and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA). First, for the TDMA MECO system with infinite or finite cloud computation capacity, the optimal resource allocation is formulated as a convex optimization problem for minimizing the weighted sum mobile energy consumption under the constraint on computation latency. The optimal policy is proved to have a threshold-based structure with respect to a derived offloading priority function, which yields priorities for users according to their channel gains and local computing energy consumption. As a result, users with priorities above and below a given threshold perform complete and minimum offloading, respectively. Moreover, for the cloud with finite capacity, a sub-optimal resource-allocation algorithm is proposed to reduce the computation complexity for computing the threshold. Next, we consider the OFDMA MECO system, for which the optimal resource allocation is formulated as a mixed-integer problem. To solve this challenging problem and characterize its policy structure, a low-complexity sub-optimal algorithm is proposed by transforming the OFDMA problem to its TDMA counterpart. The corresponding resource allocation is derived by defining an average offloading priority function and shown to have close-to-optimal performance in simulation.

Visual cryptography for general access structures A visual cryptography scheme for a set P of n participants is a method of encoding a secret image SI into n shadow images called shares, where each participant in P receives one share. Certain qualified subsets of participants can “visually” recover the secret image, but other, forbidden, sets of participants have no information (in an information-theoretic sense) on SI . A “visual” recovery for a set X ⊆ P consists of xeroxing the shares given to the participants in X onto transparencies, and then stacking them. The participants in a qualified set X will be able to see the secret image without any knowledge of cryptography and without performing any cryptographic computation. In this paper we propose two techniques for constructing visual cryptography schemes for general access structures. We analyze the structure of visual cryptography schemes and we prove bounds on the size of the shares distributed to the participants in the scheme. We provide a novel technique for realizing k out of n threshold visual cryptography schemes. Our construction for k out of n visual cryptography schemes is better with respect to pixel expansion than the one proposed by M. Naor and A. Shamir (Visual cryptography, in “Advances in Cryptology—Eurocrypt '94” CA. De Santis, Ed.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 950, pp. 1–12, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1995) and for the case of 2 out of n is the best possible. Finally, we consider graph-based access structures, i.e., access structures in which any qualified set of participants contains at least an edge of a given graph whose vertices represent the participants of the scheme.

The industrial indoor channel: large-scale and temporal fading at 900, 2400, and 5200 MHz In this paper, large-scale fading and temporal fading characteristics of the industrial radio channel at 900, 2400, and 5200 MHz are determined. In contrast to measurements performed in houses and in office buildings, few attempts have been made until now to model propagation in industrial environments. In this paper, the industrial environment is categorized into different topographies. Industrial topographies are defined separately for large-scale and temporal fading, and their definition is based upon the specific physical characteristics of the local surroundings affecting both types of fading. Large-scale fading is well expressed by a one-slope path-loss model and excellent agreement with a lognormal distribution is obtained. Temporal fading is found to be Ricean and Ricean K-factors have been determined. Ricean K-factors are found to follow a lognormal distribution.

A competitive swarm optimizer for large scale optimization. In this paper, a novel competitive swarm optimizer (CSO) for large scale optimization is proposed. The algorithm is fundamentally inspired by the particle swarm optimization but is conceptually very different. In the proposed CSO, neither the personal best position of each particle nor the global best position (or neighborhood best positions) is involved in updating the particles. Instead, a pairwise competition mechanism is introduced, where the particle that loses the competition will update its position by learning from the winner. To understand the search behavior of the proposed CSO, a theoretical proof of convergence is provided, together with empirical analysis of its exploration and exploitation abilities showing that the proposed CSO achieves a good balance between exploration and exploitation. Despite its algorithmic simplicity, our empirical results demonstrate that the proposed CSO exhibits a better overall performance than five state-of-the-art metaheuristic algorithms on a set of widely used large scale optimization problems and is able to effectively solve problems of dimensionality up to 5000.

Collective feature selection to identify crucial epistatic variants. In this study, we were able to show that selecting variables using a collective feature selection approach could help in selecting true positive epistatic variables more frequently than applying any single method for feature selection via simulation studies. We were able to demonstrate the effectiveness of collective feature selection along with a comparison of many methods in our simulation analysis. We also applied our method to identify non-linear networks associated with obesity.

Robot tutor and pupils’ educational ability: Teaching the times tables Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils’ educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconclusive results and never while systematically investigating how differences in educational abilities match with different robot behaviors. We applied an autonomously tutoring robot (without tablet, partly WOz) in a 2 × 2 experiment of social vs. neutral behavior in above-average vs. below-average schoolchildren (N = 86; age 8–10 years) while rehearsing the multiplication tables on a one-to-one basis. The standard school test showed that on average, pupils significantly improved their performance even after 3 occasions of 5-min exercises. Beyond-average pupils profited most from a robot tutor, whereas those below average in multiplication benefited more from a robot that showed neutral rather than more social behavior.

Efficient Unknown Tag Identification Protocols in Large-Scale RFID Systems Owing to its attractive features such as fast identification and relatively long interrogating range over the classical barcode systems, radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology possesses a promising prospect in many practical applications such as inventory control and supply chain management. However, unknown tags appear in RFID systems when the tagged objects are misplaced or unregistered tagged objects are moved in, which often causes huge economic losses. This paper addresses an important and challenging problem of unknown tag identification in large-scale RFID systems. The existing protocols leverage the Aloha-like schemes to distinguish the unknown tags from known tags at the slot level, which are of low time-efficiency, and thus can hardly satisfy the delay-sensitive applications. To fill in this gap, two filtering-based protocols (at the bit level) are proposed in this paper to address the problem of unknown tag identification efficiently. Theoretical analysis of the protocol parameters is performed to minimize the execution time of the proposed protocols. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the protocols. The results demonstrate that the proposed protocols significantly outperform the currently most promising protocols.

Unknown Tag Identification in Large RFID Systems: An Efficient and Complete Solution Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology brings revolutionary changes to many fields like retail industry. One important research issue in large RFID systems is the identification of unknown tags, i.e., tags that just entered the system but have not been interrogated by reader(s) covering them yet. Unknown tag identification plays a critical role in automatic inventory management and misplaced tag discovery, but it is far from thoroughly investigated. Existing solutions either trivially interrogate all the tags in the system and thus are highly time inefficient due to re-identification of already identified tags, or use probabilistic approaches that cannot guarantee complete identification of all the unknown tags. In this paper, we propose a series of protocols that can identify all of the unknown tags with high time efficiency. We develop several novel techniques to quickly deactivate already identified tags and prevent them from replying during the interrogation of unknown tags, which avoids re-identification of these tags and consequently improves time efficiency. To our knowledge, our protocols are the first non-trivial solutions that guarantee complete identification of all the unknown tags. We illustrate the effectiveness of our protocols through both rigorous theoretical analysis and extensive simulations. Simulation results show that our protocols can save up to 70 percent time when compared with the best existing solutions.

Revisiting an RFID Identification-Free Batch Authentication Approach SEBA is a recently proposed probabilistic identification-free batch authentication solution for RFID tags. It significantly differs from traditional RFID authentication approaches: rather than relying on authentication information delivered by the tags, it exploits the position of the tags' transmissions in response to an authentication challenge. This letter revisits, and meanwhile extends, SEBA. We show that SEBA is a particular case of a more general framework, called SEBA+, which envisions multiple tag responses in a frame. These are in turns interpreted as a Bloom filter, whose authenticity is verified against an authenticator Bloom filter comprising all the deployed tags' computed responses. Our proposed extension significantly improves SEBA's performance when more stringent counterfeit RFID tag detection capabilities are required.

Sampling Bloom Filter-Based Detection of Unknown RFID Tags Unknown RFID tags appear when the unread tagged objects are moved in or tagged objects are misplaced. This paper studies the practically important problem of unknown tag detection while taking both time-efficiency and energy-efficiency of battery-powered active tags into consideration. We first propose a Sampling Bloom Filter which generalizes the standard Bloom Filter. Using the new filtering technique, we propose the Sampling Bloom Filter-based Unknown tag Detection Protocol (SBF-UDP), whose detection accuracy is tunable by the end users. We present the theoretical analysis to minimize the time and energy costs. SBF-UDP can be tuned to either the time-saving mode or the energy-saving mode, according to the specific requirements. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol. The experimental results show that SBF-UDP considerably outperforms the previous related protocols in terms of both time-efficiency and energy-efficiency. For example, when 3 or more unknown tags appear in the RFID system with 30 000 known tags, the proposed SBF-UDP is able to successfully report the existence of unknown tags with a confidence more than 99%. While our protocol runs 9 times faster than the fastest existing scheme and reducing the energy consumption by more than 80%.

Completely Pinpointing the Missing RFID Tags in a Time-Efficient Way Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has been widely used in inventory management in many scenarios, e.g., warehouses, retail stores, hospitals, etc. This paper investigates a challenging problem of complete identification of missing tags in large-scale RFID systems. Although this problem has attracted extensive attention from academy and industry, the existing work can hardly satisfy the stringent real-time requirements. In this paper, a Slot Filter-based Missing Tag Identification (SFMTI) protocol is proposed to reconcile some expected collision slots into singleton slots and filter out the expected empty slots as well as the unreconcilable collision slots, thereby achieving the improved time-efficiency. The theoretical analysis is conducted to minimize the execution time of the proposed SFMTI. We then propose a cost-effective method to extend SFMTI to the multi-reader scenarios. The extensive simulation experiments and performance results demonstrate that the proposed SFMTI protocol outperforms the most promising Iterative ID-free Protocol (IIP) by reducing nearly 45% of the required execution time, and is just within a factor of 1.18 from the lower bound of the minimum execution time.

On Efficient Tree-Based Tag Search in Large-Scale RFID Systems Tag search, which is to find a particular set of tags in a radio frequency identification (RFID) system, is a key service in such important Internet-of-Things applications as inventory management. When the system scale is large with a massive number of tags, deterministic search can be prohibitively expensive, and probabilistic search has been advocated, seeking a balance between reliability and time efficiency. Given a failure probability <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\frac {1}{\mathcal {O}(K)}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , where <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is the number of tags, state-of-the-art solutions have achieved a time cost of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathcal {O}(K \log K)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> through multi-round hashing and verification. Further improvement, however, faces a critical bottleneck of repetitively verifying each individual target tag in each round. In this paper, we present an efficient tree-based tag search (TTS) that approaches <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathcal {O}(K)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> through batched verification. The key novelty of TTS is to smartly hash multiple tags into each internal tree node and adaptively control the node degrees. It conducts bottom–up search to verify tags group by group with the number of groups decreasing rapidly. Furthermore, we design an enhanced tag search scheme, referred to as TTS+, to overcome the negative impact of asymmetric tag set sizes on time efficiency of TTS. TTS+ first rules out partial ineligible tags with a filtering vector and feeds the shrunk tag sets into TTS. We derive the optimal hash code length and node degrees in TTS to accommodate hash collisions and the optimal filtering vector size to minimize the time cost of TTS+. The superiority of TTS and TTS+ over the state-of-the-art solution is demonstrated through both theoretical analysis and extensive simulations. Specifically, as reliability demand on scales, the time efficiency of TTS+ reaches nearly 2 times at most that of TTS.

A Privacy-Preserving and Copy-Deterrence Content-Based Image Retrieval Scheme in Cloud Computing. With the increasing importance of images in people’s daily life, content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has been widely studied. Compared with text documents, images consume much more storage space. Hence, its maintenance is considered to be a typical example for cloud storage outsourcing. For privacy-preserving purposes, sensitive images, such as medical and personal images, need to be encrypted before outsourcing, which makes the CBIR technologies in plaintext domain to be unusable. In this paper, we propose a scheme that supports CBIR over encrypted images without leaking the sensitive information to the cloud server. First, feature vectors are extracted to represent the corresponding images. After that, the pre-filter tables are constructed by locality-sensitive hashing to increase search efficiency. Moreover, the feature vectors are protected by the secure kNN algorithm, and image pixels are encrypted by a standard stream cipher. In addition, considering the case that the authorized query users may illegally copy and distribute the retrieved images to someone unauthorized, we propose a watermark-based protocol to deter such illegal distributions. In our watermark-based protocol, a unique watermark is directly embedded into the encrypted images by the cloud server before images are sent to the query user. Hence, when image copy is found, the unlawful query user who distributed the image can be traced by the watermark extraction. The security analysis and the experiments show the security and efficiency of the proposed scheme.

On the ratio of optimal integral and fractional covers It is shown that the ratio of optimal integral and fractional covers of a hypergraph does not exceed 1 + log d , where d is the maximum degree. This theorem may replace probabilistic methods in certain circumstances. Several applications are shown.

Constrained Multiobjective Optimization for IoT-Enabled Computation Offloading in Collaborative Edge and Cloud Computing Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications are becoming more resource-hungry and latency-sensitive, which are severely constrained by limited resources of current mobile hardware. Mobile cloud computing (MCC) can provide abundant computation resources, while mobile-edge computing (MEC) aims to reduce the transmission latency by offloading complex tasks from IoT devices to nearby edge servers. It is sti...

MOEA/D: A Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm Based on Decomposition Decomposition is a basic strategy in traditional multiobjective optimization. However, it has not yet been widely used in multiobjective evolutionary optimization. This paper proposes a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D). It decomposes a multiobjective optimization problem into a number of scalar optimization subproblems and optimizes them simultaneously. Each subproblem is optimized by only using information from its several neighboring subproblems, which makes MOEA/D have lower computational complexity at each generation than MOGLS and nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II). Experimental results have demonstrated that MOEA/D with simple decomposition methods outperforms or performs similarly to MOGLS and NSGA-II on multiobjective 0-1 knapsack problems and continuous multiobjective optimization problems. It has been shown that MOEA/D using objective normalization can deal with disparately-scaled objectives, and MOEA/D with an advanced decomposition method can generate a set of very evenly distributed solutions for 3-objective test instances. The ability of MOEA/D with small population, the scalability and sensitivity of MOEA/D have also been experimentally investigated in this paper.

IntrospectiveViews: an interface for scrutinizing semantic user models User models are a key component for user-adaptive systems They represent information about users such as interests, expertise, goals, traits, etc This information is used to achieve various adaptation effects, e.g., recommending relevant documents or products To ensure acceptance by users, these models need to be scrutable, i.e., users must be able to view and alter them to understand and if necessary correct the assumptions the system makes about the user However, in most existing systems, this goal is not met In this paper, we introduce IntrospectiveViews, an interface that enables the user to view and edit her user model Furthermore, we present the results of a formative evaluation that show the importance users give in general to different aspects of scrutable user models and also substantiate our claim that IntrospectiveViews is an appropriate realization of an interface to such models.

A Framework of Joint Mobile Energy Replenishment and Data Gathering in Wireless Rechargeable Sensor Networks Recent years have witnessed the rapid development and proliferation of techniques on improving energy efficiency for wireless sensor networks. Although these techniques can relieve the energy constraint on wireless sensors to some extent, the lifetime of wireless sensor networks is still limited by sensor batteries. Recent studies have shown that energy rechargeable sensors have the potential to provide perpetual network operations by capturing renewable energy from external environments. However, the low output of energy capturing devices can only provide intermittent recharging opportunities to support low-rate data services due to spatial-temporal, geographical or environmental factors. To provide steady and high recharging rates and achieve energy efficient data gathering from sensors, in this paper, we propose to utilize mobility for joint energy replenishment and data gathering. In particular, a multi-functional mobile entity, called SenCarin this paper, is employed, which serves not only as a mobile data collector that roams over the field to gather data via short-range communication but also as an energy transporter that charges static sensors on its migration tour via wireless energy transmissions. Taking advantages of SenCar's controlled mobility, we focus on the joint optimization of effective energy charging and high-performance data collections. We first study this problem in general networks with random topologies. We give a two-step approach for the joint design. In the first step, the locations of a subset of sensors are periodically selected as anchor points, where the SenCar will sequentially visit to charge the sensors at these locations and gather data from nearby sensors in a multi-hop fashion. To achieve a desirable balance between energy replenishment amount and data gathering latency, we provide a selection algorithm to search for a maximum number of anchor points where sensors hold the least battery energy, and meanwhile by visiting them, - he tour length of the SenCar is no more than a threshold. In the second step, we consider data gathering performance when the SenCar migrates among these anchor points. We formulate the problem into a network utility maximization problem and propose a distributed algorithm to adjust data rates at which sensors send buffered data to the SenCar, link scheduling and flow routing so as to adapt to the up-to-date energy replenishing status of sensors. Besides general networks, we also study a special scenario where sensors are regularly deployed. For this case we can provide a simplified solution of lower complexity by exploiting the symmetry of the topology. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our approaches by extensive numerical results, which show that our solutions can achieve perpetual network operations and provide high network utility.

An indoor localization solution using Bluetooth RSSI and multiple sensors on a smartphone. In this paper, we propose an indoor positioning system using a Bluetooth receiver, an accelerometer, a magnetic field sensor, and a barometer on a smartphone. The Bluetooth receiver is used to estimate distances from beacons. The accelerometer and magnetic field sensor are used to trace the movement of moving people in the given space. The horizontal location of the person is determined by received signal strength indications (RSSIs) and the traced movement. The barometer is used to measure the vertical position where a person is located. By combining RSSIs, the traced movement, and the vertical position, the proposed system estimates the indoor position of moving people. In experiments, the proposed approach showed excellent performance in localization with an overall error of 4.8%.

A Hierarchical Architecture Using Biased Min-Consensus for USV Path Planning This paper proposes a hierarchical architecture using the biased min-consensus (BMC) method, to solve the path planning problem of unmanned surface vessel (USV). We take the fixed-point monitoring mission as an example, where a series of intermediate monitoring points should be visited once by USV. The whole framework incorporates the low-level layer planning the standard path between any two intermediate points, and the high-level fashion determining their visiting sequence. First, the optimal standard path in terms of voyage time and risk measure is planned by the BMC protocol, given that the corresponding graph is constructed with node state and edge weight. The USV will avoid obstacles or keep a certain distance safely, and arrive at the target point quickly. It is proven theoretically that the state of the graph will converge to be stable after finite iterations, i.e., the optimal solution can be found by BMC with low calculation complexity. Second, by incorporating the constraint of intermediate points, their visiting sequence is optimized by BMC again with the reconstruction of a new virtual graph based on the former planned results. The extensive simulation results in various scenarios also validate the feasibility and effectiveness of our method for autonomous navigation.

Information bounds and quick detection of parameter changes in stochastic systems By using information-theoretic bounds and sequential hypothesis testing theory, this paper provides a new approach to optimal detection of abrupt changes in stochastic systems. This approach not only generalizes previous work in the literature on optimal detection far beyond the relatively simple models treated but also suggests alternative performance criteria which are more tractable and more appropriate for general stochastic systems. In addition, it leads to detection rules which have manageable computational complexity for on-line implementation and yet are nearly optimal under the different performance criteria considered

The graph Voronoi diagram with applications The Voronoi diagram is a famous structure of computational geometry. We show that there is a straightforward equivalent in graph theory which can be efficiently computed. In particular, we give two algorithms for the computation of graph Voronoi diagrams, prove a lower bound on the problem, and identify cases where the algorithms presented are optimal. The space requirement of a graph Voronoi diagram is modest, since it needs no more space than does the graph itself. The investigation of graph Voronoi diagrams is motivated by many applications and problems on networks that can be easily solved with their help. This includes the computation of nearest facilities, all nearest neighbors and closest pairs, some kind of collision free moving, and anticenters and closest points. (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Least squares one-class support vector machine In this paper, we reformulate a standard one-class SVM (support vector machine) and derive a least squares version of the method, which we call LS (least squares) one-class SVM. The LS one-class SVM extracts a hyperplane as an optimal description of training objects in a regularized least squares sense. One can use the distance to the hyperplane as a proximity measure to determine which objects resemble training objects better than others. This differs from the standard one-class SVMs that detect which objects resemble training objects. We demonstrate the performance of the LS one-class SVM on relevance ranking with positive examples, and also present the comparison with traditional methods including the standard one-class SVM. The experimental results indicate the efficacy of the LS one-class SVM.

Modulation Classification Based on Signal Constellation Diagrams and Deep Learning. Deep learning (DL) is a new machine learning (ML) methodology that has found successful implementations in many application domains. However, its usage in communications systems has not been well explored. This paper investigates the use of the DL in modulation classification, which is a major task in many communications systems. The DL relies on a massive amount of data and, for research and appl...

Machine Learning for the Detection and Identification of Internet of Things Devices: A Survey The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming an indispensable part of everyday life, enabling a variety of emerging services and applications. However, the presence of rogue IoT devices has exposed the IoT to untold risks with severe consequences. The first step in securing the IoT is detecting rogue IoT devices and identifying legitimate ones. Conventional approaches use cryptographic mechanisms to a...

A Survey of Machine and Deep Learning Methods for Internet of Things (IoT) Security The Internet of Things (IoT) integrates billions of smart devices that can communicate with one another with minimal human intervention. IoT is one of the fastest developing fields in the history of computing, with an estimated 50 billion devices by the end of 2020. However, the crosscutting nature of IoT systems and the multidisciplinary components involved in the deployment of such systems have introduced new security challenges. Implementing security measures, such as encryption, authentication, access control, network and application security for IoT devices and their inherent vulnerabilities is ineffective. Therefore, existing security methods should be enhanced to effectively secure the IoT ecosystem. Machine learning and deep learning (ML/DL) have advanced considerably over the last few years, and machine intelligence has transitioned from laboratory novelty to practical machinery in several important applications. Consequently, ML/DL methods are important in transforming the security of IoT systems from merely facilitating secure communication between devices to security-based intelligence systems. The goal of this work is to provide a comprehensive survey of ML methods and recent advances in DL methods that can be used to develop enhanced security methods for IoT systems. IoT security threats that are related to inherent or newly introduced threats are presented, and various potential IoT system attack surfaces and the possible threats related to each surface are discussed. We then thoroughly review ML/DL methods for IoT security and present the opportunities, advantages and shortcomings of each method. We discuss the opportunities and challenges involved in applying ML/DL to IoT security. These opportunities and challenges can serve as potential future research directions.

Federated Learning: Challenges, Methods, and Future Directions Federated learning involves training statistical models over remote devices or siloed data centers, such as mobile phones or hospitals, while keeping data localized. Training in heterogeneous and potentially massive networks introduces novel challenges that require a fundamental departure from standard approaches for large-scale machine learning, distributed optimization, and privacy-preserving data analysis. In this article, we discuss the unique characteristics and challenges of federated learning, provide a broad overview of current approaches, and outline several directions of future work that are relevant to a wide range of research communities.

A standalone RFID Indoor Positioning System Using Passive Tags Indoor positioning systems (IPSs) locate objects in closed structures such as office buildings, hospitals, stores, factories, and warehouses, where Global Positioning System devices generally do not work. Most available systems apply wireless concepts, optical tracking, and/or ultrasound. This paper presents a standalone IPS using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. The concept is ba...

Energy-Efficient Resource Allocation for Mobile-Edge Computation Offloading. Mobile-edge computation offloading (MECO) off-loads intensive mobile computation to clouds located at the edges of cellular networks. Thereby, MECO is envisioned as a promising technique for prolonging the battery lives and enhancing the computation capacities of mobiles. In this paper, we study resource allocation for a multiuser MECO system based on time-division multiple access (TDMA) and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA). First, for the TDMA MECO system with infinite or finite cloud computation capacity, the optimal resource allocation is formulated as a convex optimization problem for minimizing the weighted sum mobile energy consumption under the constraint on computation latency. The optimal policy is proved to have a threshold-based structure with respect to a derived offloading priority function, which yields priorities for users according to their channel gains and local computing energy consumption. As a result, users with priorities above and below a given threshold perform complete and minimum offloading, respectively. Moreover, for the cloud with finite capacity, a sub-optimal resource-allocation algorithm is proposed to reduce the computation complexity for computing the threshold. Next, we consider the OFDMA MECO system, for which the optimal resource allocation is formulated as a mixed-integer problem. To solve this challenging problem and characterize its policy structure, a low-complexity sub-optimal algorithm is proposed by transforming the OFDMA problem to its TDMA counterpart. The corresponding resource allocation is derived by defining an average offloading priority function and shown to have close-to-optimal performance in simulation.

Visual cryptography for general access structures A visual cryptography scheme for a set P of n participants is a method of encoding a secret image SI into n shadow images called shares, where each participant in P receives one share. Certain qualified subsets of participants can “visually” recover the secret image, but other, forbidden, sets of participants have no information (in an information-theoretic sense) on SI . A “visual” recovery for a set X ⊆ P consists of xeroxing the shares given to the participants in X onto transparencies, and then stacking them. The participants in a qualified set X will be able to see the secret image without any knowledge of cryptography and without performing any cryptographic computation. In this paper we propose two techniques for constructing visual cryptography schemes for general access structures. We analyze the structure of visual cryptography schemes and we prove bounds on the size of the shares distributed to the participants in the scheme. We provide a novel technique for realizing k out of n threshold visual cryptography schemes. Our construction for k out of n visual cryptography schemes is better with respect to pixel expansion than the one proposed by M. Naor and A. Shamir (Visual cryptography, in “Advances in Cryptology—Eurocrypt '94” CA. De Santis, Ed.), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 950, pp. 1–12, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1995) and for the case of 2 out of n is the best possible. Finally, we consider graph-based access structures, i.e., access structures in which any qualified set of participants contains at least an edge of a given graph whose vertices represent the participants of the scheme.

Decentralized Plug-in Electric Vehicle Charging Selection Algorithm in Power Systems This paper uses a charging selection concept for plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) to maximize user convenience levels while meeting predefined circuit-level demand limits. The optimal PEV-charging selection problem requires an exhaustive search for all possible combinations of PEVs in a power system, which cannot be solved for the practical number of PEVs. Inspired by the efficiency of the convex relaxation optimization tool in finding close-to-optimal results in huge search spaces, this paper proposes the application of the convex relaxation optimization method to solve the PEV-charging selection problem. Compared with the results of the uncontrolled case, the simulated results indicate that the proposed PEV-charging selection algorithm only slightly reduces user convenience levels, but significantly mitigates the impact of the PEV-charging on the power system. We also develop a distributed optimization algorithm to solve the PEV-charging selection problem in a decentralized manner, i.e., the binary charging decisions (charged or not charged) are made locally by each vehicle. Using the proposed distributed optimization algorithm, each vehicle is only required to report its power demand rather than report several of its private user state information, mitigating the security problems inherent in such problem. The proposed decentralized algorithm only requires low-speed communication capability, making it suitable for real-time implementation.

Cost-Effective Authentic and Anonymous Data Sharing with Forward Security Data sharing has never been easier with the advances of cloud computing, and an accurate analysis on the shared data provides an array of benefits to both the society and individuals. Data sharing with a large number of participants must take into account several issues, including efficiency, data integrity and privacy of data owner. Ring signature is a promising candidate to construct an anonymous and authentic data sharing system. It allows a data owner to anonymously authenticate his data which can be put into the cloud for storage or analysis purpose. Yet the costly certificate verification in the traditional public key infrastructure (PKI) setting becomes a bottleneck for this solution to be scalable. Identity-based (ID-based) ring signature, which eliminates the process of certificate verification, can be used instead. In this paper, we further enhance the security of ID-based ring signature by providing forward security: If a secret key of any user has been compromised, all previous generated signatures that include this user still remain valid. This property is especially important to any large scale data sharing system, as it is impossible to ask all data owners to reauthenticate their data even if a secret key of one single user has been compromised. We provide a concrete and efficient instantiation of our scheme, prove its security and provide an implementation to show its practicality.

Adversarial Example Generation with Syntactically Controlled Paraphrase Networks. We propose syntactically controlled paraphrase networks (SCPNs) and use them to generate adversarial examples. Given a sentence and a target syntactic form (e.g., a constituency parse), SCPNs are trained to produce a paraphrase of the sentence with the desired syntax. We show it is possible to create training data for this task by first doing backtranslation at a very large scale, and then using a parser to label the syntactic transformations that naturally occur during this process. Such data allows us to train a neural encoder-decoder model with extra inputs to specify the target syntax. A combination of automated and human evaluations show that SCPNs generate paraphrases that follow their target specifications without decreasing paraphrase quality when compared to baseline (uncontrolled) paraphrase systems. Furthermore, they are more capable of generating syntactically adversarial examples that both (1) fool pretrained models and (2) improve the robustness of these models to syntactic variation when used to augment their training data.

Social Robots for (Second) Language Learning in (Migrant) Primary School Children Especially these days, innovation and support from technology to relieve pressure in education is highly urgent. This study tested the potential advantage of a social robot over a tablet in (second) language learning on performance, engagement, and enjoyment. Shortages in primary education call for new technology solutions. Previous studies combined robots with tablets, to compensate for robot’s limitations, however, this study applied direct human–robot interaction. Primary school children (N = 63, aged 4–6) participated in a 3-wave field experiment with story-telling exercises, either with a semi-autonomous robot (without tablet, using WOz) or a tablet. Results showed increased learning gains over time when training with a social robot, compared to the tablet. Children who trained with a robot were more engaged in the story-telling task and enjoyed it more. Robot’s behavioral style (social or neutral) hardly differed overall, however, seems to vary for high versus low educational abilities. While social robots need sophistication before being implemented in schools, our study shows the potential of social robots as tutors in (second) language learning.

Prescribed-Time Convergent And Noise-Tolerant Z-Type Neural Dynamics For Calculating Time-Dependent Quadratic Programming Neural-dynamics methods for solving quadratic programming (QP) have been studied for decades. The main feature of a neural-dynamics solver is that it can generate a continuous path from the initial point, and the final path will converge to the solution. In particular, the Z-type neural dynamics (ZND) that has emerged in recent years shows that it can completely converge to the ideal solution for the real-time-dependent QP in the ideal situation, i.e., without noise. It is worth noting that noise substantially influences the accuracy of neural-dynamics models in the process of solving the problems. Nevertheless, the existing neural-dynamics methods show limited capacity of noise tolerance, which may seriously affect their application in practical problems. By exploiting the Z-type design formula and two nonlinear activation functions, this work proposes a prescribed-time convergent and noise-tolerant ZND (PTCNTZND) model for calculating real-time-dependent QPs under noisy environments. Theoretical analyses of the PTCNTZND model show that it can be accelerated to prescribed-time convergence to the time-dependent optimal solution, and has natural anti-noise ability. The upper bound of the convergence time is also derived theoretically. Finally, the performance of the PTCNTZND model was verified by experiments, and the results substantiate the excellent robustness and convergence characteristics of the proposed PTCNTZND model for calculating real-time-dependent QPs, as compared with the existing ZND models.